help with first o'clock

I've got an AMD Athlon 64 3000 skt 939. I think it's 1.8 ghz and am wondering how far it can go with stable performance and with the stock cooler? Can someone fill me in with the info on how to overclock it plz? i've got a Gigabyte K8N ultra SLI.

thanks in advance.

 

http://www.hardwareforums.com/overclock-cooling-sticky-11485/

That contains links to good overclocking and cooling threads.

 

just don't try to OC too far, 10 - 20% only

 

And when you think you've got a stable overclock run something to press your system.

I personally use prime95 and memtest86.

 

maybe i didn't make myself clear. i want to know how to overclock. what to do in the bios, what to turn up and so on. thanks guys.

 

The link matt provided itsnt a bad one.

Explaining what to do depends on your motherboard and BIOS. All are slightly different in that some support features that others dont. Its hard to give accurate instructions. In fact its impossible!

The very first thing you should do is make sure you know how your components interact with each other. I cant help you there because im well out of date with it all. Multiplied FSBs were only just becoming popular when I was into overclocking. Before then CPUs simply had a multiplier in and ran straight off the FSB.

I was going to try to explain what to do but its too long winded.

Like I said above, you have to know what the FSB is and how the components operate off this frequency. Once you understand that it should be reasonably easy to know what to do.

A horrible answer to your question but....

How much do you know about the FSB, memory timings, multipliers etc?

 

to be honest and frank with you.... nothing. but hey, we always learn something new right?

 

another question, do i have to o'clock my RAM? i've got generic DDR333 modules. I'll try and check out my BIOS and see what i can see there.

 

You RAM will always be overclocked as your FSB goes up.

Ill find some links. Like I said I dont know howt the new stuff works. I suppose your best off getting your head round how the Pentium 3 and early celeron works first. Less multipliers no ddr or duall ddr etc.

 

thanks for that. ill do some research as well.

 

In traditional overclocking, that's true. However, there are FSB:Memory ratios that you can adjust to allow you to drop the memory's speed and continue cranking up the FSB.

With the Athlon64, there is no FSB. Since there's no memory controller with A64 chipsets, a large part of the reason for the northbridge is eliminated...along with the FSB. Since the memory controller has to run at a divider (since we don't have 2-3GHz DDR/DDR2 modules around). You can run the RAM slower than it's rated speed and not suffer drastic performance hits like you would with traditional designs, particularly with the AthlonXP.