Overclocking newbie, help needed

[nicros]

I have a E6600, evga 680i LT, 4G GeIL DDR2-800, and Zalman 9500 cooling.

I have never overclocked before, but want to do it with this gear.

Articles I have found on the web say that they overclocked with more or less this same setup, but are a bit light on exactly what they did to optimize their performance.

So when you overclock, do you OC the cpu, mobo and ram separately? And only with all properly tweaked will you maximize your speed? Or how does it work?

I dont want to fry my system, but I definately want to oc this stuff. Can someone tell me exactly what I need to do to optimize each component, or how to do it properly?

Thanks

 

[Scout]

Typically when overclocking you lower the memory speed so it's not a limiting factor while you try to find the max speed of your processor. Then bring the memory back up to the highest speed it will support with stability.

 

[easyg]

I have a E6600, evga 680i LT, 4G GeIL DDR2-800, and Zalman 9500 cooling.

I have never overclocked before, but want to do it with this gear.

Articles I have found on the web say that they overclocked with more or less this same setup, but are a bit light on exactly what they did to optimize their performance.

So when you overclock, do you OC the cpu, mobo and ram separately? And only with all properly tweaked will you maximize your speed? Or how does it work?

I dont want to fry my system, but I definately want to oc this stuff. Can someone tell me exactly what I need to do to optimize each component, or how to do it properly?

Thanks

If I remember rightly, the nForce application has a simple slider control which you just move up or down. Move the slider, and the FSB, CPU and memory frequencies are all adjusted accordingly. That's probably the easiest way to overclock with that MB. (To be honest, I don't know if nForce still works this way. But that's what I seem to remember).

Not to contradict Scout, but to be honest, I think most clockers start with the memory modules; just the reverse of what he was saying. Maybe I'm wrong as I've never actually seen a poll taken Essentially, you're trying to find just how high you can take the modules without generating errors. This is the most tedious and time consuming part of overclocking, since you'd be running Memtest (or a similar program) after each incremental increase in DRAM frequency.