general OC questions

[Hulk]

Say you overclock your CPU and then you install a fresh copy of windows, do you still get to keep the overclock or does it go back to the stock speeds?

Also, I have a i5 4670 and Zalman 320 cooler, what is a safe stable overclock?

 

[dragonstongue]

overclock stays in bios, so unless your bios changes the overclock should stay if you created a profile in the bios.

no overclock is "safe" but generally as long as temperatures are ok and you are not pushing way to much volts it is less likely to cause death

 

[B!nd.]

What Dragonstongue said. Also, if you don't have the "K" version of your processor you wont be able to overclock very much if at all.

 

[=Gunslinger=]

You're going to be limited on the 4670 overclock by whatever bclock your motherboard is able to run, way more so than your choice of aircooler.

 

[Hulk]

I have the "K" version of the chip and a Asrock Extreme 4 motherboard I got with the bundle at microcenter.

 

[=Gunslinger=]

Well in that case it's game on.

A safe, typical overclock on air with that setup, is something like 1.25V or so, 4.2-4.6Ghz

Really depends on the luck of the draw with the CPU, some clock nice and some are complete garbage.

Voltage can be higher, really depends upon how hot/cold your chip runs.

 

[dragonstongue]

and the quality of the motherboard in question, not downing choices but Asrock are hardly known for quality

Read ALOT to get the best performance you can out of it, not that AMD and Intel are the same but a wicked high clock speed vs balanced with clock, memory-memory controller and in AMD case HT Intel case QPI? can have dramatic performance improvements as well as not everything is purely clock speed constrained.