Step by Step Guide to OC'ing e6400

[Mudokon]

From what ive been reading on OCing the e6400 it should go like this:

1- go into bios
2 - slowly up the FSB 3-5mhz at a time
3- save/restart, see if it boots
4- when it doesnt boot, try again but up the voltage slightly to counterbalance???

just unsure of what the next step would be? or should i just up the FSB slowly until it wont post, reset the mobo (take out the cmos battery?) and go back to the last stable FSB i OC'ed to.

whats the next step? i dont want to push it (STOCK HEATSINK) i just wanna see how far i can get, if only to increase the 2.1ghz to say 2.3ghz or so.

sorry, big newb here, just wanna be careful, i fried my motherboard on my old xp 2600 rig (abit nf7-s mobo) because i didnt know what i was doing

 

[GuitarDaddy]

1. Buy two CPU's
2. Install 1 CPU, increase FSB and all voltages and keep increasing FSB until you smell smoke
3. Back off all setting 5%, install second CPU

Done

 

[neuralnut]

I have two identical E6400 rigs and haven't had any problem overclocking either of them, although I have had different results with the two. Motherboards are ASUS P5W DH.

The stock heatsink is a limitation, when I ordered the parts for my two the supplier only had one zalmann 9500 in stock, so I ran my second machine with the intel cooler for the first few days. It would not overclock past 2.8 Ghz and would run at 53 degrees C under load, whereas my other machine would OC to 3.2 GHz reliably and run @ 40 degrees under load. I stress that I am overclocking for 24/7 reliability, I don't want to run extreme voltages or temps and I need the machines to be 100% reliable.

I now have zalmann 9500s on both machines, and although one still runs slower and hotter than the other, it now gets 3 GHz and 43 degrees C under load.

The E6400 does not seem to need high voltages to overclock, mine are running at 1.375 Vcore and I have seen many reports of them achieving good overclocks with stock Vcore. On the P5W DH it seems to be more important to get the memory and VMCH voltage up. I have set mine to 2.1 V and 1.6V respectively.

The differences between my chips is baffling, the faster one overclocked to 3.4 easily but had one crash after about 12 hours of running intensive calcs, so I dropped it back a bit. I haven't pushed it since as I have had too much work to get done on the machine, but it overclocked so easily and ran so cool it seems to have potential to go higher. The other E6400 has been tougher to overclock, I haven't been able to get it run much over 3 GHz even after playing around a lot with the voltages.

Anyway, you don't have too much to fear overclocking these chips, they run fairly cool and don't need high voltages. It's the motherboard and the memory that are more likely to be the bottleneck in the process

 

[Mudokon]

well should i even attempt since i have the ASUS p5b (vanilla) motherboard? i do have great RAM though , Corsair xms2 ddr2-800 2GB.

so to start, step by step.

i should go into the bios, slowly increase the FSB, save,restart, check stability? and that should be fine to get be up to 2.3 2.5 probably?

if stuff messes up, it doesnt post, what do i do then? or when i restart do the ASUS mobo reset back to normal bootable settings?