Okay well, I will be brief: I need to get the most performance possible out of an AMD Phenom 9600. Quad-core sucks and it puts out a lot of heat, so I used AMD Downcore, a function built into my motherboard, to deactivate two cores and transform this Phenom into a dual-core processor. As a result of that, my heat fell drastically (to 26C idle) which means I have a ton of room to overclock. By the way that 26C is with it already overclocked from 2.3 to 2.6 GHz. The room temperature is 25C.

Some relevant information:


My cooling information isn't really relevant except that the temperatures mentioned above are correct.

I am totally new to overclocking, so I set it on auto-overclock in the BIOS to 15%, which raised me to the current level. I have options to do this all the way to 30%, however anything higher than 15% makes the computer freeze at the windows loading screen. I am not sure what I can do here, but I want to get my processor as fast as I can. I believe the multiplier is locked at 11.5x, since i tried increasing that in the BIOS manually and it doesn't actually increase it, so I will need an alternative way to do it. I am not quite sure what the auto-overclocking sets things to, so I would be willing to try whatever. I have a lot of money but at the moment I am waiting for the new Deneb 45nm AMDs to come out, so I am not willing to buy a new processor. Anything else, however, is pretty much fair game. My PSU is a 1000W Enermax Galaxy, so I assume it can handle anything you want to throw at it.