Am I overclocking my rig correctly?

[XLeezardx]

I dont really know what im doing, but whatever im doing, it made my games run alot better.

Heres my rig:
AMD X2 4200+ with Stock HS/Fan
Asus A8N-SLI
2GB Corsair XMS PC-3200
EVGA 7900GT KO 512MB with Stock HS/Fan
Antec 550watt Power Supply
Coolermaster case with with Stock 120mm Fan

This is my first time overclocking and I am AMAZED! Im sure what im doing is not right and could probably do better. I hope you guys can point me into the right direction and help me get the best performance out of my PC. What I did was I went into my BIOS, enabled AI overclocking program within the BIOS and did a 10% overclock. CPU was set to 220mhz and I did not touch the RAM settings since I have no clue what to do with RAM. I let my Computer start and its not running 2.4GHZ from 2.2GHZ @ 45C ide tempature. I then Overclocked my Video Card by using the "detect optimize" under in the Nvidia settings. Stock is 560/1550 and was overclocked to 590/1624 @ 59c idle tempature. I ran Oblivian and F.E.A.R at their maximum resloution with a few things turned down and it ran better than before, it now playable. Before my games was not smooth and hurt my eyes moving the mouse around. My unregistered 3dMark 2006 score went from 5237 to like 5615. Everything ran great, no wierd artifacts and no system crashing. Of course im a bit scared so i set everythign back to stock before i go all out and get overclocking fans and heatsinks. So what do you guys think? Any advice? Thanks in advance

 

[Borgschulze]

A.I. is what you're doing wrong, I would manually overclock, look for the A64 overclock guide that (cf)Eclipse has posted.

 

[po134]

This thing is great for new in the OC world. I personally used that fonctionnality on one of my old rig, but 105 is simply not enough for me right now as I now have a +-20% increased.

Well the method you used it not the best, but that way the motherboard is adjusting almost all the speed by itself so you don't have to touch anything or wory about it. You could OC a lot more with the proper cooling solution, but this way there's no risk for your videocard (I mean your OC was small) or any other component that might be affected by an extreme overclocking.

Make sure you have a good airflow in your case as overclocking make your temp rise a lot during long period of gaming and if it rise too much it might make your system crash. If you have good airflow you can put it @10% without any problem as it is a very low OC and your videocard too, but run some bench (for e.g. 3dmark 2006 2-3 times) and check yout gpu/cpu/mobo/case temp just to make sure.

If you wanna get serious and buy new heatsink/fan/maybe even casing then I suggest you learn how to OC by yourself as the AI utility from asus block it @10%.

Hope it helps.

 

[solobaricsrock]

yeah, i have your motherboard. Dont use the AiBooster. Uninstall that and use ClockGEN. Then just set your memory in the DRAM Config tab (in BIOS) to 400Mhz. After that use ClockGEN to step up the CPU. I would go slow and use the PLL Control sparingly. Then after you upclock, simply go on the net or play a game. if it freezes or does some funky stuff, just go in and downclock a bit. Also you might consider upgrading your CPU heatsink, as Manchesters get warm when they OC, and stock heatsinks arent the best.....

 

[nooh]

Actually , the ai booster has improved quite some bit in the last 6 months and to some extent a wee bit safer overall , now that is.

The AMD is a bit more weirder to overclock with HTT and making sure it stays at the right level. Also make sure your PCI is loacked at 33.3 and pciexpress locked at 100.

You can on asus board to leave the HTT as auto but everything else i would advise to read it up , Eclipse is the guy for this and seems to have dissapeared.

The ram and cpu are pushed and synchronised, increasing the memory bandwidth and cpu speed. Eclipse notes on this are amazing and explains it far better than i.