I’ve got a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and today I flashed the bios from GA-K8NSC-939 F7 TO GA- K8NSC-939 F8 for the first time with no problems so far. And I’m curious as to what else I can do to get a bit more kick out of it and that’s why I’m here. As you can tell I know zip about OC and wanted to ask was there a basic tweak I could do to start off with to see if I could see a difference. I know I shouldn’t have but I changed the CPU Clock from 200 up to 227 and it seemed to make a small change in speed. Should I have done that and if not changing it back would cause a problem.

Flashing the BIOS won't do anything to improve performance unless there's a specific issue addressed by the flash. And looking at the list at Gigabyte, BIOS F8 did nothing but add support for more CPUs.

To overclock your system, you need to do the following:

- lower the HT bus from 5x (1000MHz) to 4x (800MHz)
- lower the RAM speed from DDR400 to DDR333
- lock the AGP at 67MHz
- disable all Spread Spectrum settings
- disable Cool 'n Quiet
- disable "Top Performance"
- manually configure your RAM timings @ 2.5-3-3-10
- increase the CPU freq from 200MHz to 250MHz, but do it in increments, not one big jump
- increase the CPU voltage as necessary to stabilize

If you're able to pull it off, your CPU will run at 2250MHz, your RAM at approx 205MHz& the HT bus will be back up to 1000MHz.

This guide should help:

http://icrontic.com/articles/a64_ov...

Thanks Jam
I can see how to change HT Bus 5x to 4x which it already is at 4x.
Lowering the RAM speed from DDR400 to DDR333 is a bit tricky when I do that I see other settings change.
Locking AGP at 67 MHz I can change that from 66 to 67 but as far as locking it I haven't been able to do that.
Disable Cool'n Quiet I can't find any reference to that in my bios.
Disable Top Performance that's done.
Manually configure my RAM timings @ 2.5-3-3-10
Well that one I wouldn't have a clue were to look to do that.
Increase the CPU freq from 200MHz to 250MHz that I can do as well as increase CPU voltage. Anyway I've got a bit of reading to do so thanks again Jam I'll get back and let you know how I went.

What I've done so far is I lifted CPU freq from 200HMz to 235HMz and raised CPU voltage up to 1.450 while the HT was already at 4X the RAM timing has got me I believe it's at 2.5-3-3-7.
But anyway heres a link from CPUID
http://home.iprimus.com.au/gcambo/o...

@ lil leo,

Please enlighten us all on how overclocking should be done!

@ cambo,

The list in response #1 is generic. Obviously if the BIOS settings aren't available, you can't do anything about it. One correction I have to make is about the HT bus. Default for your board is 4x (800MHz)...you'll need to change it to 3x (600MHz).

Tests have shown that 2.5-3-3-10 are the optimal RAM timings for boards based on the nForce3 250Gb chipset. Same goes for setting the AGP speed at 67MHz instead of 66MHz.

Try going into the BIOS, then press "CTRL + F1" to see if it brings up a hidden BIOS menu.

Here's a screenshot from earlier this year:

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i...