The journey of overclocking begins!

Overclocking is something that I've always wanted to do. And today, when I should have been finishing an assignment about National Park Management, I decided to read up and perform some overclocking, hehehe.

So far I've:

• Joined overclockers.com 
• Overclocked my desktop PC using the preloaded OC profiles on my ASUS motherboard, and
• Crashed my desktop once -> a BSOD!!

Here's a neat little YouTube vid that I found interesting. The dude states, and it sounds as though this could be the first tenet of overclocking, and that is that the NB Frequency must be equal to or greater than the HT Frequency in order to have a stable system.

NB Frequency >= HT Frequency (But is this true? I'm wondering now.)

I'll be testing this in the next few days to see if that is the case. Also, he suggests that CPU temps that exceed 65 oC may not be very good, so keep that in mind also.

Vid1
Vid2

While it was slightly disheartening when the BSOD came up, I was able to go back to default settings. What troubled me was that when I rebooted, I had somehow lost 1 core - only 5 cores were being detected/used. So even though the settings were on default, I had lost a core. But I soon discovered that the BIOS appears to have individual core on/off settings and 1 of the cores was switched off when the problem was detected. So I turned it on and everything is fine.

But I guess I learned something, don't be in a hurry.

Computer specs:
ASUS M5A88-M Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1075T
2 x 4GB Kingston RAM @ 1333MHz (need to upgrade this next)
And I suppose I should mention that I'm running most of the tests on Windoze 7....


There is a really good AMD Phenom overclocking guide here. But there are no specific posts where people show successful/stable settings. Maybe I can be the first to post one...



According to the AMD Datasheet, there are some max settings which I probably should not exeed. MT/s stands for 1 million transfers per second.

Max DDR speed: 1333 MT/s
Max HT Link speed: 4000 MT/s

Update 9/10/2011:
In regard to doing the system stability tests on Windoze, I am still as yet able to find a Linux CPU stress tester. CPU and MB temps are now docked on the top panel and this is useful. However, I'm skeptical on the accuracy as I'm almost certain that the temp is just a function of the voltage being run through particular components at any one time. As a result, the temperature factor used by Linux may be different to the temperature factor used by Windoze...