Newbie OCer looking for some tips :)

[Mashmann]

GREETINGS PEOPLE OF THE OcUK FORUM!

I should start by introducing myself so..

Helloo. Im Ash and im a total NOOB to OCing

I figured this would be a great place to get some pointers on OCing my system. Ive had a little muck around but half the settings I dont have a clue about?

My setup is...

Intel QX6800 CPU 2.93Ghz
EVGA Nforce 780i SLI MoBo
4Gb (2x2gb) OCZ Platinum RAM
OCZ GameXtreme 850w PSU (though I think I need a bigger 1)
BFG 9800 GX2
EVGA 9800 GTX+ (for Physx ofcourse)
ThermalTake BigWater cooling (2 rads cooling CPU only)
Antec 1200 Case
2x 200Gb SATA HDDs RAID0 (Me wants some solid states later)
a 500Gb SATA and a 250GB SATA for storage and backup
Oh and a DVD/RW + FDD for good measure
Windows 7 Home Premium OS

Id like to think its not a bad setup (mostly due to components cost!)

Id hope to make it a bit quicker for some serious gaming but in all honesty I wouldent know where to start!! Ive had a read up on the forum but all this talk of "to much voltage will kill" and such things had me a lil worried so I figured id ask those that know

Any help or advise would be schweeeet

Thanks Muchly

 

[Akempster]

first of all you will want to get some software like realtemp, CPU-z and prime 95. The first two provide information about temps and your cpu settings, prime 95 places your cpu under stress. Make sure you get some good temps at load (around 60 degress max). If this is the case go to the BIOS and raise the CPU's BCLK by 2, reload and run prime. Any errors with prime will show a system instability. Keep raising the clk untill its unstable, will post back to let you know what to do next

 

[Akempster]

how to further overclock

your PSU is fine. You may want to set up your hard drives in raid to speed things up a bit.

Once you have reached a point where the system becomes unstable you will need to increase the cpu voltage. I tend to keep this within 5% of the suggested value. This will give you more room to raise the bclk further.

You will also want to overclock the graphics card, there are several programs to do this which you can find on the overclocking forums. Other areas to look into are RAM and then, if you want to get into you should look at northbridge overclovking and maybe even network overclocking. I would also look at makingin sure your computer has enough cooling power, this is becausethemore effectiveness your computer cooling the bigger the overclocks you can get. For ultimate speed on start up you may be interested on loading the OS onto an SSD drive connected through a PCI slot as these run a lot faster.