[matsta31]

Hey, welcome to the nice world of overclocking. But watch out, ther a possibility this hobby of yours to become really expensive.

First off, Intel has some baseline specification published for your CPU where they tell :
the Max voltage (without damage) is 1.36 V
and the max temp (again without damage) is 65 C.

Now, you'll find a lot of people going over and above thoses numbers and many swearing that they see no permanent damage on their CPU. This is a personnal choice that you'll have to make at one point.

I am telling you this, because my E8400 wont do 4.0 ghz under 1.36 Volt. There is a lot of lucky people who got a good chip and can do 4.0 at around 1.32Vcore.

Also, dont play with the ram yet, I would leave it at auto until you find a good cpu OC. This will greatly help to trouble shoot if you cant OC past a certain level, because you can simply exclude ram trouble.

As for the overclocking step, Want I like to do is try to boot with little increment of FSB.

An example of this would be,

I raise the FSB 10-15 ghz.
Try to boot, it boots ? Good, prim95 on all cores for about 10 minutes
It passes ? re-raise the FSB and try again.

you fail at any point, raise the v-core one shot or 0.01 volt.

Once you are at the oc level you want, you'll need to really stress test and do a 12 to 24 hours run. I personally prefer longer run, since my computer folds and there is no point for me to O/C if it is not 24/7 stable.


Be sure to fold for HWC !

Any question, ask away !