I've finally gotten around to overclocking my desktop and I'm a little confused. I'm at the point where I have the voltages and other changes made and it will start. The last test I ran on Prime95 only ran 25 minutes after I changed the CPU voltage to 1.28125 from what is pictured and I'm really not sure what to change now. Can anyone kind of point me in the right direction as to what I should change? Would it help if I changed some of the settings back to auto? I was originally taking the CPU voltage down and that was getting nowhere, so I raised it. thats why its raised to what it is now. At what point do I stop raising this and change a different setting?

I'm using Prime95 to stress it and CPUID, CPU-Z, and RealTemp 3.00 to monitor.

The temps durring the Prime95 test are pretty consistant at around 42 C for core 0 and 36 C for core 1 and the GPU staying at around 44 C

Here are the system specs:Windows XPAsus P5Q Pro moboIntel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPUThermalright True black-120 CPU coolerOCZ Fatality 1066 RAM, 2Gbs8800GT Video card640 Gb Western Digital HDAntec NeoPower 650 BlueAntec 900 case

And finally some pictures of what I've done so far:

Temps and voltages from the monitoring programs

What kind of gains are you seeing and with what program?

I'm at 3.6 GHz on the CPU right now, it came factory at 3.0 GHz. This seems to be a pretty common overclock for the E8400. What do you mean about the program? I'm doing it all through the BIOS and just using the programs I mentioned in the first post to monitor and test. When I left for work it was at about 4 hours on Prime 95. Hopefully it will still be going when I get home. Nobody has any techniques that they use to overclock?

Techniques... A damn good heatsink/fan setup. A case that provides a lot of airflow...

As far as overclocking, it is a lot of trial and error. A fair amount of BSOD, restarting and retweaking the BIOS.

Adjust one parameter at a time. I can't stress that fact enough. If you start tweaking all sorts of stuff at once, you won't have a good grasp of what worked, and what it was that gave you the BSOD.

As you require more from the proc, you need to increase it's voltage,, but by absolute minimal amounts. Do it in small incriments.

Same goes for your memory.

Make sure that if your northbridge and FSB are strapped together, you unstrap them.

I had best luck keeping my FSB at a number that matched what the memory freq was, and adjusted the multiplier.

I know it sounds like a rediculous process, but I know what I am talking about. I have a 1.8ghz proc OC'd to 3.6ghz, on air cooling, never breaking 49ºC. I have been running it stable for just under two years at 100% overclock. It has been documented here as well as on OC forums.

Here is the thread on my OC. I had it at 3.5, and after a few days of tweaking, got it to run stable at 3.6ghz.

zerothread?id=314042

The thread on the OC forums is probably more in detail. I don't really remember, and don't care to go find it.

Thanks a lot Beancooker. I have the heatsink/fan setup covered with an Antec 900 full of fans and the Thermalright cpu cooler. It idles in the low 30s and the highest its gotten is 57/55 core0/core1 running prime95 at 4.4 GHz. I cant unstrap the FSB to Northbridge so i have been leaving it in auto except when I was trying to bring up the RAM speeds.

I was unable to get it to run longer than 7 hours in prime95 at 3.6 GHz no matter what I changed. So while I was looking through some articles I found one by Legion Hardware and decided to follow their settings. I left all the voltages on auto and just changed the FSB frequency. It still wouldnt work at 3.6 so I tried 4.0 and now have it running stable at 4.2 with an FSB frequency of 470.

The RAM is only running at about 940 MHz with an FSB/DRAM of 1:1. I messed with it some but it doesn't seem to want to post when I set it higher. I overclocked it to a little over 1100MHz at 4.0 GHz though. I'm still reading up on RAM timings and settings though.