Over Clocking

OCing these days is relatively easy if you read the motherboard manuels. With the UEFI software that allows you to OC without going into BIOS and does a step by step procedure anyone with a little common sense can do it. Aw but here is the catch if you don't understand the facts about OCing and you don't know the limits for your rig you will endup with freezes, crashes, BSOD or possibly fry some component. You will definitely shorten the life of your CPU, ram and GPU depending on whether you OC 1, 2 or all 3 components.

Lets discuss the limits of your build: the first is the temperature at which the CPU can handle no matter whether it is AMD or Intel when the temprature exceeds the limit you will get either a freeze, a crash or a BSOD this is the system protecting itself. What are the temprature limits for my CPU you ask well here is where you must do some research, you go to the manufacturers web site and find your cpu specs and read that info till you find where they say max temprature that is the point you do not want to go past unless you are willing to pay the price. The next limit is the voltage for the CPU again as before you can find that at the manufacturers web site under the specs for your specific CPU a warning here the higher the voltage the more heat produced.

Let us look at the facts for OCing you will never be able to get below ambient temprature with normal cooling types (air & water), you will never get a stable OC if you don't learn to balance the OC or test it for stability.

Ambient temprature is the temprature around you or your rigg, say you like the cooler temps so you keep the house/apt at 70*F or 19*C your rigg produces heat so inside the case depending on the cases cooling and airflow the ambient temp would be about 80*F or 24*C this would put your CPU at about 100*F or 34*C (this is just an example) which would be at idle and a decent set of temps. Now as you are using your rigg and applying a load to it the temps will rise and your fans will start to raise in rpm to cool things off, this is where a good monitoring program comes in handy allowing you to keep an eye on the temps and possibly the rpms of your fans and the voltage changes.

Here is where we talk about balancing the OC: you want to keep the heat produced to a minimum and the voltage as low as you can while still getting the best OC you can for overall performance. Balancing these 2 major factors to your OC can get aggravating at times since until you test it under load you don't have any idea if its stable or not this is why we always recomend you do it in small steps and test after each OC (use either prim95 or OCCT). Just a reminder here make sure your PSU is strong enough and has enough watts and amps to power your OC as well as the rest of your components ( I have found that going from a 550 to a 610 to a 650 watt PSU has increased my OCing ability).

Time to discuss your case and its ability to cool and maintain a good airflow: You will get a lot of arguments over whether a positive or negative airflow is better in your case so here are the facts negative airflow or more air being exhausted than coming in has 1 major draw back and that is it sucks in dust thru every crack & creavice in your case. This means more time spent tearing your rigg down and cleanning out the dust. Positive airflow or more cool air coming in prevents this by exhausting air thru every crack & creavice in the case but still draws dust in thru the intake fans reducing the frequency of cleanning your rigg out. This is why some people look at cases that come with filters built in or ways to mod the case so they can install their own filters.My rigg sounds like a jet taking off when I'm doing intense work or gaming, how many times have you heard this or said it yourself? Yep that is all those fans running at high rpm trying to cool that poor rigg down and that is the trade off you face when OCing. How can I solve this problem you ask again its a matter of balancing the heat against the noise, you can install bigger fans that run at a lower rpm but produce the same amount of airflow (cfm) or you can buy a fan controllor so you can adjust the fans rpm or get fans that plug into the mobo allowing the BIOS to control the fans rpms.

Lots of info to digest, so I will continue later.

Now the first question that most people ask is what are the best settings for my rigg to get the best OC, well that is a nonanswerable question. Each rigg is different the CPU waffers vary from 1 to another each stick of ram is different and each mobo is different even the PSU can effect the OC. This is again why we stress small steps and stress test after each step. Normal use will not put that much of a load on your rigg so everything may work fine on a daily basis but you start doing heavy gaming or heavy CPU/ram usage programs and boom freeze, BSOD or crash and then you wonder why. The prim95 or OCCT stress test puts the system under a 100% load and gives you reports on how well your system handles the test this allows you to go back and fine tune things such as lowering the OC, raising the voltages, or lowering the fsbs.

Wondering how the PSU can effect an OC, well the higher demand for higher voltages to the mobo, CPU, GPU or ram can put a strain on the PSU depending on the wattage and amps your power supply is rated for. Using myself as an example my last rigg started with a Corsair 550 and I was able to hit 3.84ghz on the Q9550 but when I swapped it for a PCP&C 610 I was able to get to 4.0ghz and later upgraded to a PCP&C 650 hit 4.21ghz and this was from a stock 2.83ghz cpu.

There are those riggs with no UEFI capabilities so you have to go into the BIOS and change settings as well as enabling or disabling certain items in the BIOS. This is where your mobo manuel is very important and a must read before playing with those settings. Each manufacturer of mobos use different BIOS and each of them use different terminology for the functions in BIOS so I won't try to list all the stuff in BIOS since it is in their manuels and posted on their web sites for each mobo.