955 basic OC question

[KleeziE]

Well I just bought a new system and today I got it all put together and I was a bit curious if I was doing the overclocking correctly. I havnt really done fine tuning overclocking ever and I wanted to run it by you guys to see if how i did it was ok...

Specs:
AMD PII x4 955, MSI nf980-g65 mobo and 4gb Gskill ripjaw 1600 with a TRUE cooler

All I did in the bios was up the core clock to 244 and increased the cpu v to 1.490, ram v 1.6 and NB v to 1.3. Is this ok process these days for overclocking by just upping the the core clock, voltages and not touch any other multipliers?

I did look up info on other people overclocking this board and chip and they all changed multipliers intead of just doing the core clock speed like I did. This is why I am polling you guys to see if what I did is an accepted method for doing an overclock.

Thanks for the advice/opinions and thanks for helping out an OC'ing noob.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

save yourself time.. put the core clock to 200 and raise the multiplier.. leave the ram and HT on the default settings.. with that heatsink you should have no problem hitting 3.8-3.9 maybe even 4ghz.. the only reason to use the core clock for overclocking is if the motherboard does not have an option for DDR3 1600 and you have to overclock the processor for the ram to run at DDR3 1600.. your more likely to hit 4ghz with the multiplier then using the core clock.. most AMD motherboards are limited to around 250mhz on the core clock and id bet the nvidia board is as well.. the only AM3 board ive seen break 250 is the MSI 770 boards which have hit well over 300mhz on the core clock..

 

[KleeziE]

So getting the HT freq to a certain point or the NB freq to a certain point doesnt matter?

 

[sirmonkey1985]

not really.. theres just no real gain in NB performance on the phenom II DDR3 IMC.. the C3 chips gained a little bit more performance over the C2 chips but even then raising the NB clocks wasnt a huge performance boost.. maybe 1-2 seconds in load times on stuff.. thats about it.. the HT isnt as big of a deal unless you are running at 2 5970's in quad crossfire or triple SLI.. even then clock speeds are more important.. but its really up to you..

you can also overclock with a combination of the core clock and the multiplier.. but rely heavily on the multiplier to overclock and not the core clock.. the less you have to raise the NB voltage the better the temps you will get as well.. the IMC's on these chips create a ton of heat.. but just mess around with it.. see how high you can get with just the multiplier alone.. then see if you can hold that clock by lowering the multiplier and raising the core clock at the same time if you want to run the NB and HT above stock..