Best Methods to O/C AMD AM3 Phenom x4 955 processor

[Conundrum]

If there's already a thread I managed to miss, please direct me to it. If not, I was wondering what suggestions users of this forum might have. What's the most you should attempt to overclock with stock cooling? I have a black edition processor, and I've heard that you should attempt to overclock until you see artifacts appearing. Then take it back one and stick with that.

Would you say that's good practice? I had read that the multiplier isn't locked on these processors. I'm looking for a guide of sorts for someone to attempt overclocking to get the most out of the processor. I've heard that the 3.2 can go up to 4.something without any special cooling solutions being utilized. The case I have has excellent flow. The case itself is in my signature, along with the specs for my system. Minus the motherboard I'll put in there later.

I'm hoping someone can direct me to an existing thread that would be of great assistance, or even make this one into something more recent. I'd gladly edit the thread to include any important information along these lines to anyone else that might click on it.

Thanks!

 

[Eureka]

Download prime95, running it for 10-30 minutes will generally crash your system if its overclocked too high. 4.something is a stretch, especially if you're on a 64-bit system. Realistically you can expect 3.7-3.9 stable on a 64-bit system, with good cooling.

Read through this:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=1497607&enterthread=y

But generally the simplest way to overclock is to go into your BIOS, bump the multiplier up to 18 (3600mhz), since that's a generally stable overclock. Then go up by .5 until prime95 starts crashing, or windows crashes on startup. Then you can start bumping up the voltage by .05v.

 

[Conundrum]

Thanks for the tips Eureka, I'll do that.