[Solved] Overclocking my 3800+

I played around with OCing for the first time last night, and I got my Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2 ghz stock, san diego core) to 2.809 ghz using this guide:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=391768

I ran Prime95 Large FFT test for 8 hours and it's stable so far.



The gist of the tutorial that I linked is:

Get the following programs:

cpu-z (to check your voltage and speed in mhz)
prime95 (an application that pushes your cpu to the max, to see if it can work well with the new speeds and temperature)
speedfan or another program to view temperatures

-use manual voltage, set it to 1.4v at first, NEVER go above 1.5v, that's the socket 939 processor limit I read about in another thread. It seems your AMD 64x2 3800+ has a recommended voltage of 1.35v to 1.4v, so just to be safe I would put your voltage at 1.375v in the BIOS, so that the CPU-Z voltage which may be higher than the BIOS voltage never exceeds 1.4v. Watch speedfan for your temps and never let it go too high, 71 degrees Celsius is max for your processor it seems.

At first, my asus A8N5X was set on auto-voltage and it cpu-z shows the voltage fluctuating between 1.42 and 1.47 volt at stock speed, even though my bios said it was 1.39v. I reduced the voltage to 1.375v to see if it would drop temperatures (it does), now the bios says 1.375v but the cpu-z says its 1.41v. It passed an 8 hour Prime95 test so I just let the voltage at the lower level.

Isolate each of the 4 overclockable elements and try to find their maximum individual speed:
-Hyper transport Link(HTT, called Hyper Transport Frequency in my BIOS),
-Front Side Bus (FSB, called cpu frequency on my BIOS)
-Memory (DRAM configuration in my BIOS)
-CPU (CPU multiplier)

Test how high each can go. Then use some calculator to figure out the optimal setting. The calculator in the http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=391768 was broken so I just went with logic by maxing out the CPU speed while not making any of the other components go above their max

To isolate each of the 4 components, go in the BIOS,
For example, to test your maximum Front Side Bus (FSB) speed,

reduce the cpu multiplier to 6x, HTT multiplier to 3x, RAM speed to the lowest value (200 mhz in my BIOS, normal value is 400 mhz for DDR400)
Then increase the FSB (called CPU frequency on my asus mobo bios) from the default 200 mhz by increments of 5 mhz. Increase by 5 mhz, save BIOS settings, load windows, run Prime95 Large FFT test for several minutes, rinse and repeat until you either cannot load windows or Prime95 says they are errors. Write down your highest FSB value.

Then test HTT max speed by
reset FSB to 200 mhz, reduce the cpu multiplier to 6x, increase HTT multiplier to 5x (or whatever is highest for your mobo), RAM speed to the lowest value

Then do the +5 mhz game and test in Prime95 until you cannot load windows or Prime95 fails. When either of these fails, reduce FSB by 5 mhz to go back to where everything was stable, then open cpu-z and write down your HT Link value (1021 mhz in the pic I attached) HT Link value = FSB multiplied by the Hypertransport Multiplier. If your max HT link is 1200 mhz for example, when you overclock all your components at once, you can use (for example, actual values may vary) FSB value 300 mhz X Hypertransport multiplier of 4 = 1200 mhz, or 240 mhz FSB X HTT multiplier of 5 = 1200, 225 X multi of 5 = 1125 mhz, lower HTT is fine, it's the least important element to boost speed, compared to cpu speed etc,

For my PC, max HT Link was 1225 mhz, but in the end I chose 1021 mhz (HTT multi X4 multiplied by 255 mhz FSB, since 255 mhz FSB was stable for my processor at 11x multi which gives me 2809 mhz cpu speed)

anyway this is just to get you started, read the entire
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=391768

for a successful overclock