Overclocking virgin, some basic questions

[Chowder Head]

Hey guys, I bought and put together my rig a few weeks and now I'm ready to get into it and start overclocking. I had oc'ing in mind when I was selecting my parts (see sig) and now it's time to see what my setup will really do.

My rambling aside, my first question would be should I overclock a specific part first such as the RAM, cpu, etc, or what I start off at won't really matter?

Next up, I'm sure you guys read eclispses RAM guide, so hopefully someone can answer this question. Here's an exert from his guide:

"Ok, for the testing, I like to do something like this: Find lowest timings possible at whatever the stock speed of your motherboard is. Say that I have some pc4400 (275mhz) and put it into a Athlon64 rig, the memory will automatically run at 200mhz. Find the tightest timings at these speeds.
Next, raise the timings one at a time until you find the one that makes the largest mhz increase over your previous timings, and find the max. repeat until you get to 3-4-4 timings."

Now the specs for the stock timing for the G.skill RAM I have are already 3-4-4-8. So should I skip this step and begin to lower Tcl and so on?

And my last question for right now, is when I start overclocking and want to test for stability, I can load memtest on a CD and have that accessed before my OS loads, correct?

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks guys!

 

[newls1]

I would still use the 3/4/4/8 timings (unless your ram is DDR1 TCCD, I would use 2.5 /3/3/10 timings) keep raising the FSB up in 5 MHz increments and keep checking stability using SP2004 large FTT test, until it reports back errors, (im actually doing this now as I type to you) If your RAM is TCCD DDR1 that ram will scale VERY WELL using 2.75Vdimm and 2.5/3/3/10 timings to around 300FSB depending on MOBO.

**EDIT** I see your using 2x1GB sticks of gskill, they dont use TCCD, so that blows what I said in the water . Keep your 3/4/4/8 1T timings, and just scale up your FSB and use SP2004 large tests to check stability.

 

[boucher91]

make an iso or d/l the iso of memtest then burn to cd....
i use ac120 and or nero....
you may be able to get timings al itttle lower but not much if ocing unless ur lucky....

 

[ghost6303]

...so that blows what I said in the water

ok after reading so many posts with misused slang and old adages that dont make sense, im going to start posting corrections when i find them.

correction: "blows it OUT of the water"

 

[bluetech]

My rambling aside, my first question would be should I overclock a specific part first such as the RAM, cpu, etc, or what I start off at won't really matter?

First, torture your system at stock, cuz if it's not stable at stock, well, overclocking is pointless. You then need to determine what each part of your machine can do, separately, and thorougly test as you go. Once you get that figured out you can try pushing the entire system to the determined limits, and then you'll see if it can all work together reliably at those speeds.