I run my Athlon II X2 240 ( which is OC'ed to 3.71 GHz stable from stock 2.81 GHz) and my Celeron E3200 (which is OC'ed to 3.30 GHz from stock 2.40 GHz) 24/7 Folding@Home (in addition to a GT 430 on the Athlon rig and a GeForce 210 on the Celeron rig.) Temps are perfectly fine, they max out at about 60C (both the CPU and the GPU temps.) The chipset temps are around 36 C, which is perfectly fine. My DRAM speed on the Athlon rig is 1771.6 MHz, on the older Celeron rig, which only supports DDR2, is 930 MHz.
I overclock because I simply cannot afford many of the higher-end CPUs/motherboards/graphics cards.
ryukis215, your motherboard doesn't have that many features, for example it doesn't allow you to change the NB frequency and DRAM frequencies, all of which have great bearing on your CPU overclock. It doesn't allow you to change the voltage, which may be a good and a bad thing...
I would leave the SB overclock and PCI-E alone for now-until the CPU is done then you can start upping those
Okay. To start off, change your HT Link width to 16↑16↓. Then change your link speed to the minimum possible. I would leave the ACC options alone for now till we test for stability and because I doubt AMD has started cripping Phenom II X6s into Athlon II X4s. ACC can be a useful tool in increasing the stability of individual cores, though.
Now for the fun part! Increase your CPU Reference clock(that's what it says on your motherboard) all the way up until you cannot POST. When you find the maximum value that will still allow you to POST, boot into Windows and run IntelBurnTest on Standard, 10 loops. Most likely it will pass. If it doesn't, back down by 5 MHz on the Reference Clock and try again. You can try with Orthos which will give you reports for indivual cores. If a single core fails, enable ACC and add 2% or so to the core that failed, and try again.
When you find an FSB value that is stable, begin upping the HT-Link Speed until you find the highest value that will still allow you to POST. Repeat IntelBurnTest, Standard, 5 loops this time.
I have noticed relatively minor FPS gains(like 5 FPS or so in Crysis 2, 1280x1024 No AA) when upping the PCI-E frequency-on my motherboard I can go up to 150 MHz, and have been running it like that ever since. I had a MSI 760G motherboard that allowed me to set the PCI-E freq. to 700 MHz
, so I would rather go with a max of 200 MHz. I did set it to 700 MHz once, it posted, but I had a gut feeling if i booted into Windows 7 with its DirectX Aero effects, something would definitely go wrong. If you want to overclock your GPU, use EVGA Precision. I will leave that out for now. A good GPU stability test is FurMark.
A quick google search shows that people have had zero performance gains with overclocking the SB(I have never come across any motherboards which allow you to do that...), so I will leave that up to you.
