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Are you familiar with going into the BIOS of your computer and changing the settings for how your motherboard works? For example, you can set the time, or disable onboard sound so that an expansion soundcard works, or you set the boot priority for your system to look on your hard drive first, or your CD/DVD first, or your USB ports first, etc.
If you are familiar with that (??), then to overclock with today's technology, you will have a motherboard that allows you to change the clock settings for the speed of your CPU &/or RAM. There is a "clock multiplier" settings. Your base mobo operates at a certain MHz (the base used to be 33 MHz). You tell your motherboard to use a multiple of that, like 5x, for example, and you get 5 x 33 = 166 MHz (there are rounding issues, just bear with me).
On more modern systems, you have a base that is larger, like 800 MHz, and you use multiplier values such as 4x to get 3.2 GHz. So, if you get an AMD Deneb 955
Black Edition, it's rated value is 3.2 GHz. Your mobo detects what it should run at (usually) and chooses the correct multiplier value. If it messes up, you get to set it manually to what it should be, or you
want it to be. Note the
Black Edition ... in the world of AMD, these aretheir premium, robust CPUs that can take a solid extra bit of OCing.
Many mobo's allow you to manually set this value, so you can choose 5x, for example, and run the CPU at 4 GHz.
This can be hideously dangerous, because your CPU uses a lot more clock cycles and gets much hotter ... thus the cooling block aftermarket to increase heat dissipation.
So, you should already know some of this, just wanted to tie it all together.
In addition to the multiplier setting, sometimes you also need to adjust the voltage to get a stable system ... again, from within the BIOS. One reason I mentioned Gigabyte mobos earlier is that they have one of the most robust and flexible BIOS solutions for these sorts of hat tricks.
Overclocking your RAM is a very similar operation, and you also get to play around with "timing" values. When you look at RAM, you'll see something like "CAS latency 9" and timings of 9-9-9-24. For 1600 MHz RAM, this is pretty spanking solid; but, with some luck and playing, you might get timings down to 8-8-8-24
or run it at 1800 or 1833 MHz (very difficult to do both, and stressful to your RAM) and gain a few extra % in performance.
A good mobo also has safety & reset options ... meaning, if your system is unstable, it shuts down automagically and lets you reboot into your BIOS and adjust to less aggressive values. Again, Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI are very good ones to start looking at; there are other options.
In the end, with examples such as I just listed, you can boost your overall system performance by 20%-25% using a well-ventilated case and good air cooling block (on CPU) & cooling fins (on RAM). Some mad-scientist types go for extreme, like pushing a 3.2 GHz rated CPU up to 5.5 GHZ or even try for 6 GHz. God bless 'em, but for normal mortals like ourselves, getting 4 GHz, or maybe 4.2 GHz, is quite a nice,
SAFE performance bump to shoot for.
One more tweak: depending on your video card, you may be able to overclock that by ~10%-20%, and further maximize your hardware. So, you decide if 25% performance increase is worth your time.
http://overclock.net is pretty much THE standard resource to jump off and begin to really explore this. You will learn enough vocabulary and find enough links to determine what you might wish to attempt safely. The bottom line here is that you will have to learn a fair bit about your hardware to really push the envelope, but you can get by with basic knowledge if you're happy just tweaking up slightly.
Get your build together, get it operating at all its rated values, make sure everything is stable and not defective.
THEN slowly change one value at a time, a little bit at a time, until you move its performance up the scale a bit. You're gonna need to learn a few utilities (about 4 minimum, 8 or 10 if you get into it) to analyze your system and to stress-test & burn it in, but none of them are brain surgery.
