Overclocking Noob. Help Me OC my ASUS P5N-D please!

turnedmyworld

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Jun 17, 2010
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Hey guys so I just built a new system and am not happy with the gaming performance im getting with it. I did an a.i. overclock on the cpu/ram at 5% and it gave me a slight boost in fps. So now I want to take it further. Thing is a.i. overclock links the ram, so my board wont boot past a 10% oc. So I need some help OCing just the CPU.

My System:

Asus P5N-D nforce 750i chipset
Intel Core2Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz and 6mb L2
DDR2 @ 667Mhz 4gigs @ 1gig per stick. 5,5,5,15 timing. (Reused from old rig)

Now Ive tried reading about overclocking and it just doesnt make sense to me. So could somebody with some knowledge of this setup help me out? Suggest some settings or something?

My goal is to get it in the 3.2GHz territory but anything in the 3's is fine with me.

Just please be very specific with your answers and sorry if im slow to understand it. Im actually pretty smart and it kinda frustrates me that im not able to do this on mty own. Thanks for any help.

-Matt

UPDATE

I was able to overclock my Q9400 to 2.96. Not bad, but not great either. I cant get the board to post if I put the FSB past 1480 (1333 standard). Ive left all my voltages on auto. If I upped the FSB and adjusted the voltages would that help? Or am I just stuck at that FSB cap? Also I have the RAM unlinked and set at 667. Could that be holding it back? Would upgrading to 800mhz DDR2 help me increse my overclock? Thanks for any help in advance.
 
You may have to increase your CPU voltage, somewhere between 1.26 and 1.30.
-- Increase the FSB so the CPU is set to run ~3.0GHz,
-- Try removing 2 sticks of RAM and change your RAM strap or divider to keep the RAM around 667MHz (with the latency and voltage settings matching those on the RAM stickers. If you are using an x86 OS, you don't really need all 4 sticks of RAM anyway - those OSes can only see and use about 3.25GB of ALL memory (CPU, GPU, and RAM).

If you get it working, you can further refine your OC to find out how far you can get it to go.

Then you can replace the two RAM sticks you took out and increase the northbridge voltage a bump or two. Most boards don't like all 4 RAM slots populated, but will run if your increase the northbridge voltage.