Vegetano1 Wrote:Did read something about overclocking but that was a tutoriol with over 10 pages,. :/

I am happy playing Crysis at full settings.

Overclocking is really not that hard, well, for small overclocks. Your 10 page guide will be for people who want to push their machine to the absolute highest overclock they can reach without breaking, and will also contain a lot of theory you probably won't really need to know if you only want to do a basic overclock.

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Ok, Overclocking made simple (basic overclocking for beginners)

Generally, you have 2 ways to overclock the CPU. First is to raise reference clock (base clock, host clock, bus speed, FSB, whatever), second is to raise the CPU multiplier. The final CPU frequency is calculated by multiplying the reference clock by the multiplier. So if your reference clock is 200, multiplier is 15x, then you have a CPU clock speed of 200 x 15 = 3000MHz = 3GHz. Both of these values can be changed in the bios.

I'm pretty sure for your CPU (Core i7 920), the multiplier is locked, so all you can do is raise the reference clock. So pretty much, you raise the reference clock to something you want, and then stress test the system (load it with very CPU intensive stuff and see if it crashes or not). Pass the stress test, and you successfully overcloked.

Example: You want to overclock your E8400 from 3GHz to 3.42GHz. You initially have a reference clock of 333, and a multiplier of 9x, making a clock speed of 333 x 9 = approx 3GHz. Now you want 3.42GHz, and you can't increase your multiplier, because it's locked at 9, so you need to increase your reference clock. Go into your bios, and up your reference clock (probably refered to as "FSB" in your bios) to 380. 380 x 9 = 3420. Run Prime95 for a few hours, no errors (that's a very mild overclock for an E8400, you won't get any errors) then you have just successfully overclocked.

Now this is very basic overclocking, and can only let you do a moderate overclock at most. You will NOT be able to overclock your E8400 from 3GHz to 4.5GHz by just raising the reference clock and doing nothing else. Not going to happen. To do large overclocks, it becomes pretty complicated. But you don't really want to do super big overclocks anyway, since that's not really healthy for the system. Want to overclock big anyway? Go read that 10 page guide.

You will probably need a decent CPU cooler to overclock decently, and good parts (motherboard, RAM...) lets you overclock better. Hell, if you're not going to overclock, IMO it's pointless buying good parts and a custom cooler, may as well save your money and use cheap RAM and stock cooler.

As for how much the Core i7 920 can overclock... I think you'll easily able to go to something like 3GHz ro 3.2GHz without increasing the voltages.

Note: AMDs are slightly harder to overclock. You need to also make sure HTLink doesn't exceed NB, and down the HTLink multiplyer as you up the reference clock, to keep HTLink steady.

(This post was last modified: 06/03/2009 06:04 AM by Assassinator.)