Help With Overclocking?

[Wynder]

Greetings, folks...

Recently got a new board and CPU... MSI Neo2 SLI and an X2 3800+ (OCZ 2x1gb memory)... I haven't used AMD and haven't needed to OC since I built my last machine a few years back. Having not kept up, I'm not too familliar with the terminology these days, so I was hoping to solicit some advice.

I see in the BIOS there are a few options:

ADJUST CPU FSB FREQUENCY
HT FREQUENCY
HT WIDTH
ADJUST CPU RATIO

Changing the FSB Frequency does indeed overclock the CPU... when I push it to 210, the machine reports to be running at 2.1ghz, but it also reports the DDR Speed at 210mhz. Is this the speed of the memory?

I was hoping to push it at least to 2.2 (a great goal would be 2.4), but 2.2 currently locks the machine and I have to reset the BIOS in order to get things running again, so if there's a way to increase the FSB without the DDR speed (if that is indeed my problem), how might I go about doing that?

Also, what is the optimum temperature for an AMD CPU? Obviously, 'As cool as possible' is going to be the immediate answer, but I'm riding around 39c and I'm wondering, if I start overclocking and heat becomes an issue before hardware, where a good redline is.

Thanks,
Wynder

EDIT: A bit more information on the memory: OCZ DDR-SDRAM PC3200 Value Select (3-4-4-8)

 

[spiritwalker2223]

I'm not familiar with your board but typically there are ram dividers, such as 4/5, 2/3 or sometimes shown as DDR333, DDR266 etc. If you change your ram speed by using the DDR333, what happens is that (assuming you have DDR400) it'll run your ram at fsb*333/400, so if you have your machine at fsb 240 it'll be 240*333/400 = 200mhz or DDR400. This way you can keep your ram stock or whatever.

 

[Wynder]

That helped out a bit.

I dropped the RAM speed down to 166 and was able to get up to 220mhz FSB... 230 locked things up, so I think I might be limited in some way there by hardware.

 

[Furen]

you also have to lower your hypertransport frequency from the original 1000/5x to 800/4x if you dont plan on going over 250 HTT frequency. You might also need to raise the VID (cpu voltage) eventually.