First time OCing s PC

[Miester]

i am building a PC and i want OC it

AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Deneb 3.7GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core
CORSAIR CWCH60 Hydro Series H60 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
CORSAIR Vengeance (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 CL9
GIGABYTE GV-N550WF2-1GI GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI
GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990X SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Advanced RC-932-KKN5-GP Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply
LG Black 12X BD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA Internal Blu-ray Drive
Rosewill RCR-IC001 40-in-1 USB 2.0 3.5" Internal Card Reader
Windows 7

im new to OCing and not sure if should try to OC the CPU to 4.0 the memory to CL 7 and dont even know what to OC the video card to so some input and ideas on this would help i put all components because i dont lnow if they affect the OC proccess

 

[calinkula]

From an OC perspective, the PII 980 is really close to the max frequency you can get out of those chips. It'd be smarter to save some money and drop down to something like a PII 955 or a PII 960T. The chips will max out at roughly the same frequency, it's more about luck of getting a good chip.

Also, a nice air cooler will out perform a small self-contained water cooling loop for roughly the same price. Might as well do that.

If you are a gamer though, it'd be better to save money and try to downgrade the CPU(get a i3-2100)/mobo(budget model)/cooling(cheap air cooler or stock cooler)/PSU(step down to 500~ 600 watts) to pour a lot more money into the GPU.

 

[bardacuda]

I agree pretty much with calinkula. If you haven't built it yet and you've decided you are going AMD, I would suggest going with a 960T...It is cheaper than a 980 and has the added bonus of possibly unlocking to a 6 core. Also with that socket mobo you could easily upgrade to piledriver later.

If you would be switching to intel then that CPU he suggested is priced the same as a 960T and you would be able to upgrade to an ivy bridge chip later. (which will be way better than piledriver) However it is locked and you will not be able to overclock it.

nVidia is coming out with their Kepler series any time now and AMD will have their entire line of 7xxx out soon so for a little more dough you could get a much better card. The 550ti isn't great when it comes to price/performance ratio.

Anyway though to answer your question there is a sticky at the top of the overclocking forum for AMD Black Editions. I would suggest you read the entire post before attempting a first time OC.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258573-29-black-edition-overclock-guide-raising-multiplier

If you have more questions after that, then you will at least be able to ask more specific questions and will be able to get help easier. The main thing for a first time OC is to start small and make sure your temperatures and voltages stay at safe values. Ya don't want to fry your new system right away experimenting.
Also, you'll want to change only one thing at a time, then test for stability before changing something else. If you OC to 4.0 and also lower your RAM timings and it doesn't work, then you will not know which thing you did caused the instability and you are basically taking stabs in the dark. That's all explained in that guide though.

EDIT: In the guide he suggests using 3DMark 06 for stability testing. I've never used it myself but I would suggest using LinX and running for at least an hour using "all" memory. It's very simple to use and very good at finding instabilities. A lot of people use Prime95 but I find that just doesn't cut it. I used Prime95 when I first started OCing and I passed testing for over 8 hours, but when I used LinX I found out within a half hour that my OC wasn't stable after my computer BSOD'ed and rebooted.

 

[Miester]

should i OC the cpu or will the cpu do what i want

the video card is 100 card to play with not the final one i will get

the H60 is because the fan heat sinks i saw where huge an thought they wouldnt fit my case (tell i got the case)

and 750 psu i got for future video card updates like two 570 card in SLI

but this PC is to get a better understanding on new parts and OCing (the last PC i built had AGP 4x interface. OCing at that time wasn't common)

 

[bardacuda]

Well I don't know if it will do you what you want because you haven't said what you want it to do lol. Chances are the 980 will do whatever you want as long as you don't want to win video encoding benchmarks. For gaming it's really the video card you have to worry about.
If you plan on eventually getting two 570s you should probably get an 850W. The one you picked is good but just may be cutting it a little close especially if you O.C. anything. The 850W V2 is pretty decent. I actually just got a Seasonic M12II 850 which is actually the same as the corsair 850 V2 because I want to get two of the 570 equivalent kepler's when they come out.

 

[Miester]

it mostly is gonna be a entertainment/gaming PC i would like to play most games on high settings and watch movies and maybe Microsoft Office for game lists writing down things about the games and so on.

what i got from you is cpu is good as is no OCing really needed up the video card which ill do later on. but will OCing the ram have noticeable difference CL9 to CL7 or CL8

o yea forgot mention
SanDisk Ultra SDSSDH-120G-G25 2.5" 120GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200 500 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST500DM002 in raid 0

and sorry for being veg bad habit i have i try to get to the point to quickly
i guess the main question is should i OC this set up as it is

 

[bardacuda]

None of those things are very memory intensive or require a huge amount of processing power, so no you'd not gain much of a benefit by OCing it. You might gain an FPS or 2 in games by OCing the CPU over 4GHz and office might load a little quicker, but OCing the memory isn't going to make a noticeable difference. The SSD will have a huge effect on loading times as compared to a normal hard drive and you will gain a lot of extra performance in games by upping the video card.

 

[Miester]

the last thing is whats your thoughts on is SLI. i cant find a definitive answer on it. some reviews say its the greatest thing since sliced bread others say SLI sucks.
i think ill OC the cpu and memory a little just to get a fell for it.

its a pain wading through marketing gimmicks to find what is a need , what is a want, and what is PC bling

 

[calinkula]

I ignore SLI/Crossfire for the most part. It's generally better to have one powerful card over 2 weaker cards. Even if you can get more raw power with the 2 weaker cards, you have to deal with micro stutter and whatnot. I would only consider SLI/Crossfire if you can afford 2 of the best or second best cards.

If you plan on going that big on the GPU side of things. I would worry that a phenom 2 might be a bottleneck. Should have no issue pushing one high end GPU though.

 

[Miester]

Best answer selected by Miester.

 

[Miester]

thanks for the input. its a lot better to get more present thoughts on this than go through posts that can be a bit to old to rely on