Hi To everyone, this si my first post here so please bear with me

I have recently upgraded my machine from an athlon 2600 barton on an asus a7v8x to an athlon x2 4200 manchester 939 running on an abit av8 motherboard.

I have heard that these boards are great for overclocking but the more i read the elss simple it sounds with talk of V cores, ram dividers, multipliers e.t.c. I am wondering what is the best way to do the overclock, what level i can clock it to and if it is going to be safe! I am a bit concerned about temperatures as my old cpu when idle was in the 50c raneg and my new one when idle is in the 40's. I had an overclocked 6800gt that destroyed itself even though it was only around the 70c mark.

My system specs are:
x2 4200 Manchester 939 with stock cooling
Abit AV8 motherboard
2x 512mb pc2700 ram
2 x 80gb HDD (ide)
7600gt agp graphics card
Creative Audigy 2 5.1 sound card
550W PSU

One final question, when I upgraded the CPU and mobo I continued running the same windows XP install, do I need to format and start over so that the hard drive is clean?
Thanks for your help

Ditch your stock cooling for at least a AC Freezer pro or a Zalmann 9700, or 9500 hsf. Just raise the FSB little by little and lower the memory divider little by little and see what you get. With stock volts you should be able to get 2.7ghz out of that thing. Just don't start ocing untill you get a hsf that will keep you from killing your cpu.

As Mpilchfamily said post in the CPU OC section under AMD you will get a ton of responses. Other wise read the stickys under that section....It can be confusing if you dont know about memory dividers and the HT multiplier..Try to learn as much as you can from OC guides then ask questions and we will help! Try Google for more guides. Anyway seams that the 4200 wall is about 2.6 from what I've experienced and heard about from others ..Good luck!

i got a moderate overclock on my 939 4200+ to 2.5Ghz easily on a cheap asrock mobo

It looks like you said you have pc2700 ram, I believe the 4200 operates on pc3200 (or faster) ram. You may need to upgrade your ram to have much success with the overclocking.