Your suggestions for overclock this new rig

[nevamore]

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=4667886

The e6300 is cooled by the kick a$$ Zalman CNPS 9500 (and AS5) I already owned.

I've seen some reports of the e6300 overclocking 50%-90% on air. Like the rest of you, I wouldn't mind using some of those 'free' MHz. I haven't overclocked anything in a couple years and, well, the methods just seem a bit different than they were then. Long-time sysadmins, like myself, know from experience that we aren't afraid to try new things as long as they don't affect system stability. This goes for our home, gaming PCs which is what we are talking about here.

This ASUS board comes with AI NOS which 'seems' like a nifty program to make real-time changes from the OS. I set AI NOS to 'auto' during the initial build and it has run that way for nearly a week without any hardware problems whatsoever. Using the ASUS PC Probe II, I've seen the core voltage fluctuate by as much as .1+ on the fly.

Now that I know the gear is stable I'd like to 'mildly' (re: safely) overclock. Does the AI NOS have profiles in it that I can use to auto-overclock when I launch a specific game?

Any experience and suggestions you might have will be appreciated.

 

[Arcygenical]

Don't use any "auto" overclocking profiles.

That board makes it extremely easy to overclock some, if not alot, right in the BIOS.

My suggestion is to lock the PCIe and PCI busses as normal, and bump the FSB up to 401... That should be all you need to do to get a mild OC.

 

[nevamore]

Bumping the FSB to 401 will produce what new frequency (what is the stock multiplier)? What kind of overclocks have others with similar hardware seen? Any noticeable heat increases?

 

[muppetboy]

I believe a quirk of these P5B's is that if you are using the "auto" setting for your vcore instead of a given value in the bios, when you raise the FSB your vcore is raised in line. I imagine this is how AI suite would do it too, so keep a wary eye on your temps if you go down this route.

As stated above, it's stupidly easy to OC this board via the bios, lock your PCIe bus frequency to 100MHz and your PCI to 33 MHz, and then go crazy with your FSB. In case you don't know there is a known problem with the strap between 350-400 MHz which can cause your PC not to boot in this range (oddly I only encountered this problem after I updated my bios earlier this week!!). Anyway 401 should give you 2807 MHz with the e6400's 7 x multiplier. The memory you have chosen will even run with a 1:1 ratio, all good for a huge jump in performance!!