RAM:
You should make sure your RAM is still running at its rated frequency and voltage.
Now motherboards vary but:
If you RAISE the base clock (which may provide the base clock for both the CPU and RAM) for the CPU you may have to LOWER the multiplier for the RAM so your frequency drops back to normal (i.e. 160MHz Base clock, and x10 multiplier is 1600MHz). RAM doesn't usually respond to much of an overclock, nor is it generally needed since it's rare to bottleneck RAM.
Other:
- Many motherboards have RAM controllers as well and will choose the best solution (motherboard RAM controller, OR CPU RAM controller)
- Make sure to update the BIOS for your motherboard. Sometimes a BIOS update contains new RAM profiles which add to stability (in some cases the system will constantly crash because it guesses at the proper voltages and timings and guesses wrong until a BIOS update adds the proper profile. That happened to me for my RAM and for my SSD.)
- always run MEMTEST after messing with timings (quick check, and later an OVERNIGHT check once timings are finalized)
- Overclocking for GAMING doesn't always make much difference. Often the graphics card is the bottleneck.
- Overclocking the CPU can add quite a bit of extra heat, and fan noise even in IDLE.
Do you need to overclock?
The best way is to find a level in a game that you can start and generally repeat and monitor with FRAPS to see if increasing the CPU clock makes much difference. Generic benchmarks are generally useless as they'll add a CPU score to the total but that doesn't necessarily matter for a specific game.
How I tested Crysis was:
a) put CPU to stock speed
b) loaded a specific level (VSYNC must be OFF)
c) slowly turned my man around and wrote down the MAX and MIN frame rates that FRAPS shows
d) overclock, then repeat b) and c) to see if there's much difference
*Also, if you already achieve 60FPS VSYNC overclocking won't make a difference either since you've capped your frame rate (unless it periodically dips below 60FPS).
(I generally tweak my settings to achieve 60FPS most of the time with VSYNC enabled).