Overclocking, The Basic

Today we will tell you about overclocking your PC system. Overclocking will cause your PC components like CPU, memory, and GPU or Graphic Card to run faster than before. For example the default clock speed of your CPU is 2.4 Ghz, after overclocking your CPU can run at 3.2 Ghz clock speed resulting greater performance of your CPU.

The most question we heard about overclocking is, "Can overclocking damage computer hardware?". Then we said the answer can be yes or no. Usually, temperature is our enemy when we want to overclocking our system, because this is the main reason of hardware damage in overclocking and system instability. But if you properly monitoring your system temperature with additional CPU cooler, good PC casing with good air ventilation, etc, then it will no problem to overclock your system.

The purpose of overclocking is to gain more performance from your system in daily computing, productivity, and gaming. With overclocking you can get the most out from your system with little additional cost and get the same performance with more expensive system.

Things you must notice in overclocking :
1. Your CPU specs ; to determine how far you can push it. for example I got a Q6600 @ 2.4 Ghz, so in air cooled, 3 Ghz to 3.2 Ghz is great. or maybe E7500 @ 2.93 Ghz, you can push it to 3.6-3.8 Ghz on air.
With water cooling, you can push it more..!

2. FSB (Front Side Bus), CPU multiplier, Memory RAM speed ; this gotta be difficult to understand, but we will try to explain it as simple as we can...
So here's the example.... Q6600 @ 2.4 Ghz , 1066 Mhz FSB , 9x multiplier (all in default condition)
In this case, FSB in CPU's spec = 4 x actual FSB.. So 1066 Mhz in CPU's spec, then the actual FSB is 266 Mhz... ( 1066 / 4 ).
So what actual FSB for? combined with CPU multiplier, in this case is 9x, then actual FSB * multiplier = CPU clock speed. -> 266 Mhx * 9 = 2400 Mhz

Okay, and what memory RAM speed for? the memory speed is the maximum actual FSB you can reach for overclocking. For example PC6400-DDR2, with 400 Mhz speed memory per dimm. So with this type of memory you can raise your actual FSB to 400 Mhz. Try to get 1:1 ratio between memory speed and actual FSB, because it's usually more stable and you get the full bandwidth memory transfer from RAM to CPU.

Okay, how can I know if my system is stable or not? You can test your CPU stability with CPU torture program like Prime95 to stress all of your CPU cores. Usually people stress their CPU about 18 hours to see if the system are stable enough and the temperature of the system are in normal state.
When testing you system got blue screen or freezing, then check the temperature first. When the temperature is normal so it's time to raise your CPU and system voltage which can be raised from the motherboard's BIOS. try to raise it about 0.1 or 0.125 for the voltage to make sure you are not overvoltage it and damaged your hardware. For safe temperature and voltage can be found on the internet, but I will try to find the links for you later.

Overclocking GPU is more simple than overclocking your CPU. Simply download rivatuner and install it. And inside the rivatuner, you can raise your core speed, shader speed, and memory speed of your GPU. You can also set the fan speed, monitoring your GPU temperature and many more. I will try to post an article to show you how to use Rivatuner for the first time.
To test your GPU, usually people test it with 3D Mark 06, a very useful program to benchmark your system performance and also to test the stability of your system. If you can pass all the test without error, then usually your system are stable enough.

That's all from us, if you are not understand enough you can always ask us via e-mail, we will be happy to answer your question.