Overclocking System Questions

[magratton]

Hello folks, I am happy to be entering into this area of systems tinkering. As a long time builder I have never actually tried Overclocking, but have always been much happier with the stability of the system when I put the parts together instead of relying upon Dell or some other manufacturer to make the best decisions (yeah right!) for me.

Anyway, I have been reading the System Guides that Anandtech has been putting out and was most interested in the latest one on overclocking.

Given that I am currently putting together a system I figured I would give this a try.

So, I essentially purchased what was recommended in the OC Guide (including the AS5 Paste) with one exception: I bought OCZ Gold Rev2 3700 Ram (2x256MB) instead of the recommended MushKin ram, but am using the AMD 2500+ mobile processor with the Abit mobo recommended in the article.

The questions I have a many but lets start here:

• Did I buy the wrong ram or is it just a "more than I needed" type of thing?

• I have been reading alot about vcore, fsb, mhz, CAS latency, etc. Duh... I feel st00pid now. I guess my real question here is.. .where do I start? There is obviously a lot to learn, but is there a good "Overclocking for Dummies" type guide I can read to give me an intro to this topic.

The system is still en-route from newegg so I have a bit of time to explore/read, but once this system is here and I have put all the parts in and installed the zillions of XP patches and BIOS upgrades, I hope to dive into this.

Any advice you can all offer is VERY much welcomed, and I hope to keep you all up to date with my progress in this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Wuzup101]

I haven't read the article you speak of but I'm guessing that abit board is an NF7-s rev2 or the other A something... lol? Anyway... hop over to www.nforcehq.com if you have any specific mobo/oc questions... also a great msg board. OCZ isn't my fav brand, but it is generally accepted as being pretty good. As long as you don't get defective stuff you should be golden. The abit boards both have a agp/pci lock, so you can run your fsb as high as you can go with your ram. Cas latency in a nutshell.. hum... just think of it this way... the lower the latency the faster the ram is going to respond. To get higher fsb (and therefore memory timings) you will have to "relax your timings" which means raising your cas latency. Typically good pc3200 ram will run 2-3-3-6 or lower. In this case the "2" is the cas latency. A quick look at newegg shows that your pc3700 (wich natively runs at speeds of 233mhz fsb) is rated cas 2.5-3-3-7... which is very respectable for that speed IMHO. I would recomend changing the last number "7" to "11" as it has been proven prettymuch best on your mobo... and the chipset... but feel free to experiment. Know that the lower you make those numbers the lower speed the ram is going to run at w/o error. Raising them will allow you to get some more mhz for your fsb.

Ideally you want to run as high of a fsb as you possibly can. If you can run 230+ that's amazing. These things are limited by the chipset though... however the nforce2 is a great overclocker. You should be able to get 2.2ghz easy as pie out of that chip... but I would expect more.

Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any specific ?s

for articles see:
Voltage: http://www.overclockers.com/tips822/
Testing/Overview: http://www.overclockers.com/tips645/
Basic Guide: http://www.overclockers.com/articles740/

BTW... I suggest using memtest86+ to test ram stability and prime 95 to test cpu and overall system stability.