ocing queries

[fan_83]

as i am an oc newbie (dons flame protection gear) i have some questions after reading the excellent ocing guide..

it talks about ocing from bios, testing for 20mins or so and ocing again. it emphasizes on incremental ocing

what i am curious about is ocing through windows. my mobo(gigabyte) has easy tune 5, which allows me to oc my clockspeed and volt from windows, and i am wondering would it cause instability if i were to oc in windows, find a speed that i am happy with, go to bios and then just set the values that i wanted into bios?
would it then be able to boot or would i have to do it incrementally from bios as well?
cos i already tested out the speed and voltage in ocing from windows.

could the experts point out the flaws ..

second question regarding ocing ram: as far as i am aware, almost all the pros talk about maintaining your ram speed on a 1:1, except for amd. so if i were using intel, would there be any advantage if i were to oc my ram above my fsb?
assume fsb or 200, my current ram is also 200, what kind of advantages if they exist are there for if i were to oc my ram to say 250 or 300 while maintaining my fsb at 200 ?
cos all guides talk about fsb being faster than ram, but i am curious as to what will happen if ram is faster than fsb.. and the advantages it bring


third question: so from the ocing guide, the standard ocing method would be oc, test using superpi, prime95, then oc again.. is that right? or should i add in the doom or ut2007 to test for stability?
i know that sandra is use for benchmarking as well as pcmark, so the stressing tools one should use for testing cpu oc would be prime and super pi right?

also regarding memtest: is there a difference from using memtest in windows and from boot? does it makes a difference in the findins or is there drawback


thanks in advance for answering the quesitons

 

[Briliu]

Let me start off with pointing you over to the AMD forums (for any brand of OCing) and saying that all I learned is there and my one attempt (successful, but not used atm, since I don’t really need a faster compy ) So im still a noob too! Eclipse has written up an almost step by step guide to overclocking (second post in this link) A64 OC Guide While this all not apply to the different chips, the basic premise behind it is the same.

Changing clock and voltage from windows is ok to get a ballpark figure. If you read through the guide i linked it shows using clockgen to alter fsb speeds while you have prime95 loading your CPU(s) and a temp monitor watching temps. I followed this way and then went to bios, set the fsb to 10 below where windows/prime95 crashed/errored and went up from there to get the max at stock voltage (im personally didnt want to raise voltages up, but if you do, find the max speed, up voltage one increment, find max speed, ect)

I dont know much about the ram being faster than FSB, but what they are saying by "overclocking" ram is that the ram speed AFTER dividers is set above what the ram is initially rated for, so DDR400 (rated to 200MHz ram speed at 1:1 dividers) would run fine at stock 200MHz fsb, but if you oc fsb, you're speeding up the ram as well (say 250MHz fsb and 250MHz ram). You could buy faster rated ram and run it at 250MHz with 1:1 dividers and no change. Dividers get a bit complicated, but basicaly its a way to bring your ram speed down closer to where it doesnt give errors, while still letting your fsb soar

As far as loading programs, prime 95, theres another one that does the same as prime95 but is slightly easier to use, and super pi (big calcs) load your computer for testing. Games would be worth checking AFTER those pass because the otehrs stress your computer much more than most games do (i believe)

As far as i know there isnt a memtest you can do from windows, you need a boot floppy or boot cd.

Again, im a semi noob, but I got all this from reading on the forums, all the stickies are of immeasurable help! And above all, watch your temps!