Overclocking for a noob, where to start?

damiancds

damiancds

New Member
Okay, I checked out the overclocking 101 section, and I'm still a little confused.

My Details
I have an amd phenom II x4 980 Black edition (factory clock of 3.7Ghz)
I also have a 990fx am3+ fatality professional motherboard (this comes with monitoring/overclocking software - more on that later)
Coming in the mail is an ASUS geforce gtx 560 with a factory overclock that'll probably want to push further but I want to focus on the cpu for now.

My cpu temp stays around 29 - 32C depending on how warm my room is and around 35C - 38C under load. When I overclock it what's a safe temperature to stop at?

In my software that came with the motherboard, F-Stream Tuning, there's an overclocking page that has these stats for me to tweak:
CPU Frequency (Currently 201mhz)
PCIE Frequency (100Mhz)
CPU Frequency Multiplier (X18.5)
HT Ratio (X10)
CPU Voltage (1.4750V)
CPU NB Voltage (1.1000V)
DRAM Voltage (1.5V)
NB Voltage (1.145V)
HT Voltage (1.180V)

For a newbie, this is very confusing on where to start. Can I use this software or is it better to be done in the bios? I've heard that I should start with the frequency multiplier and see how far that gets me but I'm not sure about anything else like when it's necessary to up the voltage.

any pointers or other good resources would be greatly appreciated, thanks,
 
really there is no need for an overclock, you shouldn't notice much of a difference in use other than a benchmark. but yes the bios are better and every time you go up you must boot and check for stability, then repeat, once the cpu is unstable you go up say .1 or .2 volts, then go up the multiplier some more. for the temps, you don't want it over 70 ever, but to be safe you want it around say 65 degrees under load so it has a little room
 
at this point it's really just curiosity, so far I've gotten to 4020Mhz and stable for at least 7 hours. I'd like to hit 4200Mhz, but I'll probably just let it go at that and save the time and headache of all the little tweaks.
 
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