Hi guys, can someone help with a configuration template for my system, just some conservative overclocking settings for the new system nothing extreme.

Last time i tried to overclock anything it was about 5 years ago in college life priorities kind changed after graduation. I am looking for a dummy guide from other owners of the same hardware, kinda like a step by step go here click this type deal. Thank you for your help


SPEC:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 Conroe 2.13GHz 4M shared CPU
- GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 (rev. 1.3) Motherboard
- GeIL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 Kit 4-4-4-12 (Voltage: 1.9-2.3V if it helps)
- MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB Factory OverClocked: core clock 575mhz memory 1700mhz
- Zalman CNP9500 LED 92mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan with Heatsink
- Maxtor 300GB 16MB SATA HDD
- Antec TruePowerTrio 550W Power supply
- LianLI aluminum case
- Will be running Windows XP pro (not vista)

will this work good for a conservative setting? usually i leave my pc on for days at a time.

CPU Host Frequency: 400MHZ (*8 = 3.2 GHZ overclock)
System Memory Multiplier: 2
DRAM Timing Selectable: Manual at 4-4-4-12
Leave all the voltage stuff alone as auto.

only you can tell really whilst it is widely known that C2D are great OC'ers some can go over 500Mhz whilst some struggle at 400

i would say your likely to be fine but take it a stage at a time and test for stability once you get into the higher numbers

dont expect to hit your stable max OC within a days testing,

youve probably heard it all before tho

thanks but i dont want to spend a lot of time fidding with this, so was looking for a conservative oc setting that will pretty much guarenteed to work at one go. If 400 mhz may be unstable, what abou 350mhz then? that's 2.8 ghz which is still better than the default 2.18 ghz.

I just want to make sure the setting is safe before i make the change, dont want to end up with a no boot then have to figure out how to mess with the jumpers/cmos battery etc to restore. will be too time consuming. thanks!

I would go with fsb 333 and leave your ram at 1:1. That would net you 2.66 ghz and ddr 667, with minimal or maybe even no voltage adjustments. You may want to invest some time in it with testing and such to push it further, perhaps on the weekend.

See spec. of my similar system in the signature. I am currently using:

Multiplier: 8x
FSB: 400MHz
Memory: 1:1 800MHz, 4-4-4-12
CPU voltage: 1.3375
Memory overvoltage: 0.175 (totals 1.975)

For whatever reason this is more stable than the 333MHz-based overclocks I tried. With 333 the board would sometimes cycle through several boot attempts, then reset the FSB to 266, although no signs of instability when it did boot at 333.

Leaving the memory on Auto is probably not a good idea, as that's 1.8V and as you say, your memory is specified for 1.9V upwards. Then again I don't have much experience.

Regards leaving the CPU on Auto, I simply didn't try that yet. I have EIST enabled in the BIOS, which means the CPU will drop to 6x multiplier when idle. When CPU voltage is set to Auto then, according to CPUZ, voltage is dropped to 1.1<something>V when CPU is idling. I'm not sure, but this may not work too well when overclocking. Most people seem to disable EIST. However as far as I can tell, if you set the CPU voltage manually, it is not dropped when idling. Therefore try setting CPU voltage manually to 1.325 (the default) or slightly over like I've done.

Haven't done great stability tests other than running TAT and Sandra benchmarks a few times. Played a good bit of Half-Life 2 though. Rock-solid so far.

I would suggest checking out te how to guide that is stickied at the top of this page.

I personally am getting 3.5 ghz out of a e6300 which sounds pretty typical.

gotta wonder why Intel would put out such a highly over clockable chip, I mean its obvious its like they are selling a v8 engine as a 4 cylinder just disable 4 of em.

To the original poster: You might want to know my 3.2GHz overclock did not turn out to be stable. Now running at 3.05GHz and stock voltage, which is just about ORTHOS (12hr) stable for my particular CPU. As yakyb pointed out, there is testing involved in overclocking ... more than I thought. Not sure whether a no-brainer conservative overclock is possible. At any rate 3.2GHz appears to be aiming too high for that.