Wanna help me gather some things?
 

Well, hopefully my build will get the last of its parts on Boxing day. Going to probably get an E8400 and do some mild OCing (first time ever for me) I was just wondering if you guys could help me find all the stressing, monitoring and benchmarking programs that you use, as I'm a bit confused on what's good and what's not. I have a couple like CPU-z, GPU-z and the superpi thing but I'm not sure on everything else. Maybe we could get a sticky with all of those for the new people who come to HWC and are in the same boat as me.

Thanks,
Kyle

There is a thread with utilities link listed but it needs a little refresh.
Here's good freebies to have:

Orthos for CPU stress tests (to test the stability of your OC.)
Real Temp for temps
3dmark06 for a general (yet very synthetic) performance metric and a general stability tester
SiSoft Sandra Lite for various benchmarks and stability test and diagnostics tools

For stress testing I use Prime95, for temps I have both CoreTemp & HWMonitor as well. And a couple of other utilities but Everest isn't free.

Prime95 Download: Free Software - GIMPS
CoreTemp: Core Temp
HWMonitor: CPUID
RealTemp Real Temp - CPU temperature monitoring

Some people say that RealTemp is more accurate for 45nm and Core Temp is more for 65nm, but simply changing the TJMax values lets you use whatever one is your preference. I *think* that for 45nm TJmax is 95C, though I'm not sure since I don't have one, and Intel still hasn't released any official info on what they should be set to.

Memset for finding out what your "AUTO" memory settings are..... http://www.blazingpc.com/forum/showt...x.html?t=12523

Really important once you start pushing your OC as it's hard to know where to tweak memory for stability if you don't know what the baseline is at stock speeds.

I created a sticky with most tools available.

Whoa, there's quite a bit there. Thanks for the help everyone and thanks for the sticky Charlie.