Thanks, extremely easy to understand. What's the FSB/HTT that I've read about?
Ah please someone correct any errors, I'm a bit rusty with this but here goes:
The overall CPU performance/frequency is a result of multiplying two values, 1) core frequency, and 2) multiplier. You can increase either one. Sometimes you can have two different settings produce the same result, like 200*10 or 100*20 both produce 2000 overall, but use different settings.
The FSB/HTT is the speed of how the CPU talks to other parts of the motherboard. I think there is a generalization that when people use this term, they are approximating what the CPU core frequency is, because the FSB/HTT speed usually follows the core frequency (but now they are independently controllable). In older architectures, the FSB/HTT speed was more important because the CPU needed to send lots of info back and forth between another motherboard chip (called a northbridge) that handled memory communication. However, current architectures have the memory controller functionalilty right inside the CPU chip. So there isn't a pressing reason to increase FSB/HTT.
Instead, you would look to the CPU-NB, which can be independently overclocked and increase performance because that affects how the CPU can handle the memory control functions, speeding that up.
So you would ideally figure out the highest CPU core frequency you could obtain, and the highest multiplier, that gives you the best performance. Sometimes you use a slightly lower multiplier and that lets you achieve a slightly higher core frequency, resulting in an overall higher overclock.
Because you have an Asus board, see if you have their automated tool to overclock, called TurboV I think? Anyway, the neat thing is this tool will let you set the multiplier, and then it will adjust the BIOS by increasing the core frequency/voltage accordingly, and stress testing, then rebooting and incrementally increasing the core frequency and stress testing, etc. etc. until it reaches such a high setting that it detects instability. It will then reboot itself and display the final results before instability was reached.
So myself, I set my bios to 16x, then ran the tool to find the highest stable frequency. I could walk away from my computer while it performed this tedious function for me. Wrote down the values (16x & 250, for example). Then I set my multiplier to 16.5x, and repeat. Interestingly, the highest combination was by using a lower multiplier than I thought, but I wouldn't have found out unless I did this tedious testing and the TurboV tool helps make it less work.
You can play with voltage settings too, that increases the values you can achieve. Also, you can see about disabling unused cores. I got a higher result using 2 of my cores with the other 2 cores disabled. So that would be helpful for games like Starcraft 2 where the extra 2 cores are not used anyway, but the higher frequency will be more valuable.
I dropped 12-15 degrees under load.
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