How do I overclock?

Overclocking is definitely worth it, it's a huge value for the price. An extra 1ghz faster CPU would cost over $100-200 in price but only $20-60 in a heatsink from low to high end and maybe $50 more at most for a better mobo.

I'd say I personally only spent about $60 for overclocking gear as opposed to non-overclocking, yet I gained over 1.3ghz on my CPU and memory controller, 1.1ghz on my RAM, and 35% on my GPU. I'd say that's definitely worth the less than $100 I spent.

It also depends what games you play, but most modern games are CPU intensive. I personally not only play a very cpu intensive game like Starcraft 2, which definitely appreciates overclocking (100mhz is roughly equal to +1-3FPS, so 15 faster fps is HUGE increase in performance when you are talking about minimum frames per second, where even a 3960x at stock will struggle to run 4x4 in starcraft2 when a big battle occurs, the nature of sc2 as it is).

And, i also stream all the games I play. Now maybe you don't stream, but given your stance on overclocking I'm guessing you probably couldn't handle streaming on your system. I didn't originally stream, but because overclocking made my system much faster than what it was, I was able to stream all my games. Now I actually have a following who watch me play, and I'm getting close to making money for playing.

I know in my sig rig I have an i7, but the last 3 years I had an athlon ii x3. I unlocked and overclocked it to 3.4ghz quadcore, which let me stream 720p starcraft2. Quite a big improvement, being able to stream 720p on a $300 computer is pretty awesome. Suffice to say, my i7 build can stream an insanely high quality stream and handle sc2 easily at the same time. It's pretty nice.

Now if you play crysis 3 or bf3, the CPU isn't nearly as imporatnt, but it's still a very integral part of the game and minimum fps is always determined by the CPU.

But back to the OP - yea no way you can overclock on a stock computer. What games do you play? It'd really help if you just told us what computer you had, what components you had, and what exact games you play. We can't really help you if you don't tell us what you are even doing or working with.

You can't overclock on a pre-built computer but you can still buy a graphics card, and you can overclock a graphics card on a pre-built computer. Most games are very GPU intensive, so you could still get a huge boost in performance and an overclock of 20-40% that'd be very respectable further increase.

I don't think anyone told you you can overclock your athlon 64 on stock cooling. That's a terrible idea. The chip runs too hot even at stock settings, whoever told you that was a moron.

How much are you paying for the Athlon 64?

You know, you can build a decent computer that'll be way stronger than an xbox 360, that'll play modern games at ~medium-high graphics, for less than xbox 360. Like under $200. It'll definitely be stretching some stuff but it's possible, you'd have to buy parts on sale and such, and get the most value if you get a part or two off ebay or amazon too, but definitely doable.

You might be able to overclock like your FSB, go into your bios and see if you can change the bus or anything. Just google 'how to overclock sempron le-1250" and such, it's all out there and we're not going to baby you on it.

But yea prebuilt computers generally lock you out of all that stuff. So you are forced to just buy a new computer instead of upgrade or overclock. Not to mention they'd have a nightmare with RMAs from people blowing stuff out with overclocks, given prebuilts have warranties that are half a decade and that's their main selling points.

Generally for gaming, your GPU is what's most important. You can buy like a 4850 for $20 on ebay and that'll play medium-high graphics on those games just fine. Your CPU might be enough for those games, and most prebuilts big problem with gaming is they have no GPU, or a very weak one.

Is your FPS similar on low graphics settings as to when it's high? Or when you increase graphics, do you get huge drops in FPS? (use fraps to see fps).

When you play said games, is your cpu utilization in task manager above 90% consistently? Or is it much lower than that?

You know, you can use something like a Phenom X4 955 on AM2 boards. you are aware of that, right? You could probably find an Athlon II X3 or X4 for under $50 and that'd be a huge boost in CPU performance.

However the vast majority of games, such as the ones you listed, are all about the GPU, so it's most likely that you could put an i7-3770k in your computer and you'd still have problems. You need to have a half decent GPU to play games. And your system has no GPU at all.

No wonder you have issues... I mean the CPU you have should be okay.

$35 for a 4800 sucks.

It would be really useful if you just posted your full system specs so we don't ahve to play a million questions. Just tell me what PSU you use before you make me ask. Or we can just do this a couple more times before I get irritated and bug off or until you really want help.

250w is more than enough for a PSU unless it's a low quality PSU. Any single GPU system will be hard pressed to push past 250w (except a bulldozer maybe). Wattage tells you nothing of a PSU's capabilities. But somehow I doubt you have a quality PSU.

You don't need to buy an AM2 processor, if your system is am2+ you can get an am3 CPU and it'll work in it just fine, like a Phenom X4 955.

there is no reason to try and oc that, if you want a gaming computer for current games with high fps/performance you'd need to upgrade.

Thats an office computer