New to Overclocking: MSI 975x Platinum V.2 Motherboard and E6600 CPU

First, I have very little OC'ing experience, so thanks in advance for wading through this.

Second, I have the MSI 975x Platinum V.2 motherboard, which is very, umm, how should I put this: "Temperamental?"

I thought with my stock HSF, I could easily hit 3.0 ghz by simply changing the FSB in the BIOS. No show. The PC wouldn't even boot. After numerous hits of the reset button, I got the polite "Overclocking Attempt Failed" message, and the FSB reset itself - no other settings were lost.

Idle temps on this old horse stay in the 40-43 C range, so 3 ghz at first take doesn't sound unreasonable (or is it?). Crashes are infrequent and usually are game/application related. I built this rig back in October 2006 and consider myself one of the lucky 975x owners because I have had very few problems with this board.

That is, until now that I've tried to OC it.

Now I'm wondering what I might have done wrong. I've read numerous articles on OC'ing, in general, but could it be something quirky with this board? MSI has a forum specifically for this board in their archives and people did nothing but bitch about it each and every day. Why did I buy this one as opposed to an ASUS?

...'The World May Never Know'...

MSI has the DOT Control mechanism, which might be a better route to take. Googling this mobo and overclocking didn't really turn up anything specific to my issue, so I'd appreciate any guidance you can possibly provide.

I'm starting to live on these forums - they're great!

Thanks.

d50man to the rescue

I feel your pain; "do not use dot"
overclocking depends on your ram.

set fsb to 333 or greater
vcore to 1.40v or +.150v
MCH or Northbridge to 1.65v
and ram set to 533 strap or 667 strap if its better ram
Lock sata to 100mhz
PCI-e speed 102mhz

Please update your sig for in depth help.
ram capacity and speed
and other cooling

Thanks d50man for the detailed response and help.

One read,,, and understand how a puter works. Two MSI sucks. Three OC'ing enough to make it worth your while demand more cooling than OEM cooling.

And the adive you got in the last post is bs.

Leartn your bios. Find out how far your mem will go. Then take the mem out and play with the cpu. Then you learn how they interface. You also learn your bios and what the settings mean. No magic bullet. Wonder how we did it in the old days before the net...... Lets see,,, we learned and thought it through.

I may sound hard and a bitch. But so much is skipped over with folks trying to ignore the curve and looking for the quick insight.

Good luck in your journey.

The gruppy one,,, wheres my crazy pills.

psy

Psy, thank you for the kind assistance and generous insight.

I am running E6600 and gigabyte GA 965P DQ6 v1.0 on intel stock cooling and on stock voltage for the last 2 years @ 3.2ghz. my RAMs are cheap PC 6400 ddr2 sticks. 3 sticks totaling 5 GB. before that i had zero oc experience and this guide written by BillParrish here helped me a lot. even though your mobo is different, the basic thing will be same, like: set your CPU multiplier @ 9, set your FSB at 334, FSB:RAM ratio to 1:1. PCI E frequency to 100-102. and keep the voltages on their default value. as long as you have PC 6400 ddr2 rams and an average processor, you will have no problem booting @ 3.0ghz.