Athlon X2 4200 overclocking adivce needed

[rassklass]

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

 

[miahallen]

You need to use the search function. Nobody wants to answer your post, because this question has been asked so many times already. The answers are here, just dig a little.