Overclocking Question (what's best in my situation?)

[Animebando]

I need some clarity here on whats best in overclocking. I currently have the FSB set to 242 (giving my CPU a clock speed of 2.66GHz), however my motherboard automatically puts a divider causing the ram to run at 156 (Dual-Channel DDR 312, essentially) once it gets to a certain point (something around 220 or less I think). So my question is, is this a good performance increase, or should I downclock until the FSB on the ram is at a 1:1 ratio. These are the important parts of my system (so obviously a multiplier change is out of the question)...

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Sandy S939
ASRock Dual Sata2 (pcix/agp hybrid mobo)
1 GB (2x512) Kingston Dual-Channel PC3200
Antec 2.0 500 Watt


If you need anymore info, just let me know. Any help is appreciated!

 

[The_Abyss]

Why don't you ask in the Overclocking forum?

 

[Animebando]

Sorry, I thought I did... I must have clicked on the wrong one.

 

[Animebando]

Really? Thats quite a bit, I havent gotten mine past 2.68GHz... btw... I'm from the middle of nowhere, IL as well... join the club. lol.

 

[SidVicious]

Running 1:1 on a K8 CPU is somewhat irrelevant, the memory controller is built into the CPU itself so a divider is always in effect (CPU/11 when running your CPU at stock speed with PC-3200).

It seems like your 939Dual-SATA2 automatically apply a higher divider when the memory frequency exceed ~10% over specs (based on your "around 220 or less" figure) in order to give you more headroom (puts the memory back within specs as you overclock the CPU), quite a nice perk IMHO since this is usually done manually.

CPU-Z is a great tool to figure out what is happening, the Memory tab will give you the active divider and RAM frequency.

Once you find the upper limit on your CPU, start to experiment with your memory in order to get the most out of your hardware, note that you may have to decrease the HT multiplier, Asrock refer to that setting as the CPU-NB and NB-SB link speed, (200=1x [...] 1000=5x), set that to 600 (or 3x) if you plan to exceed 250MHz, this multiplier is applied to the HT bus (erroneously known as the FSB), just keep the multiplied value below 1000 to avoid unstabilities.