I think my unclocked CPU is bottlenecking my CF 5870's

[melonpaste]

On many games I believe that I should be getting more performance and I have seen many threads on the internet about how an unclocked PII x4 965 BE can bottleneck crossfire 5870's.

Should I try overclocking? I'm new to the whole thing because I never had a need to overclock before. Or should I use this thing called Extreme Tweaker in the BIOS? It seems to set the clockage and voltage automatically but I don't know if I should trust it. :)

[punk_zappa]

In terms of OC'ing, doing it manually is the way to go. Read all the stuff that has been written about your board and understand the BIOS. Check out all the stuff about OC'ing AMD.

[CloudFire]

Yea, there are plenty of OC-ing guides online, and you should definitely take it higher for more performance out of your CF. Stock cpu speeds won't give you the performance you want out of those cards.

[jurassic1024]

A little overclocking never hurts, but i doubt that chip at 3GHz+ stock, is gonna hurt performance in anything other than CPU limited games. Most games are GPU limited when using High detail and 4xAA+. Leave your CPU voltage at Auto, and bump up your multiplier a couple steps (3-5 above stock), then run 3DMark at Extreme settings (1920x1080), and see if there is any noticeable difference. If yes, then keep going, assuming you read the guides these dudes told you about.

[Insomnia9669]

Probably the best guide I've used to help my friend OC his 945 is this one (LINK). The 965 is unlocked too, should be even easier, and there is stuff on that guide about BE phenoms too.

*I hope its okay to link to other sites, if not please remove my post, sorry*