Very good advice.
I can hit about the same top speed with just a multi change or a bclck change + small multi change, but my max load temps are a good 10-15C cooler with the current setup in my rig.
@Brightcandle - you got kind of a lame 3930k...:/
I overclock by setting a temperature and voltage ceiling so that I don't put the chip too far out of its safe zone since I work my CPUs pretty hard most of the day. Max temperature is 70C and max voltage is 1.35V. Both of which are based on Intel's technical documents (and the xtremesystems CPU failure reports. Some poor guy had a SB pop at 1.4V in a few hours!).
I should have replaced the CPU 9 months ago when it was more valuable and less beat up. But for quite a while I thought it was the motherboard that was overheating causing the crashes and so I watercooled that to solve it. It didn't but now my VRMs are not burning hot any more. But then I was putting more heat into the water loop and I found it was warmer than I like and so I fixed that with more cooling. Then I had a couple of fans break and the machine has now been in bits waiting for replacements (my kingdom for 24 screws that work with a PA 120.3 25mm spaced rad!).
Its been the CPU all along which I really only come to the conclusion of about 2 months ago.
I haven't really tweaked this machine anywhere near as much as my X58, I didn't see much value in hunting for the ideal settings to get 4.5 Ghz when 4.4 run stable at about 1.325 V. I suspect its possible, it can run for days without crashing but once pushed or in particular games it will blue screen. 4.4 on the other hand does not seem marginal at all, seems very stable with no hunting around. I think I gave it +0.1V at one point as I had a crash but nothing since.
This is the nature of overclocking, it takes weeks to confirm a 24/7 stable settings and combined with new graphics drivers and new games it can take a while to attribute it to the CPU or GPU overclock you have applied. So in this case I am guilty of being a bit lazy with how hard I worked to get that last 100-200 Mhz that really only water can get you, but then the CPU is lame so why bother?!
I think I will wait for IB-E and haswell, see if either offers something more compelling in terms of overclock or performance and replace the bleeding thing. I have hated this X79 machine since it was born, is spent about 3 months in bits of its 12 month lifetime, its been a royal pain in the backside. Not that the motherboard + CPU is the problem, just other stuff keeps breaking (SSD failure, HDD failure, replacing the 7970's for microstutter, + all the refits of watercooling and such which takes ages).
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