Hello all,

I was able to overclock my processor,agp,and video card fine without causing any system instability. After i ajust the memory timings in the bios, any process i do on my pc that requires substantial memory causes it to completely shut off. I installed Nvidia Ntune and let it do the overclocking for me (after loading optimized defaults in bios), same issue. I have Corsair XMS pc3200 memory and i know that it is fairly stable and is supposed to overclock fairly well, but i can't seem to find the right combination that my pc can handle. I have a Phoenix-Award bios that gives me the folowing options:

dram cas latency: auto,2.0,2.5,3.0
sd ram ras-to-cas delay: auto,2,3,4,5,6,7
sd ram cycle time: auto,5,6,7,8,9,10,11
sd ram ras precharge time: auto,2,3,4,5,6

mem clock at next boot is: auto,100,133,166,200

I've reasearched on the net, but could not find any relevant info to the options that i have in my bios. Does anyone know of any good url's that could help me, or what a good baseline would be on the above settings that would be stable? Thanks for any help!

I'll try to give you some generic answers.

- Since you have a S754 board, your HTT bus is probably supposed to run at 800MHz. The HTT bus is the product of the CPU frequency & the HTT multiplier...& it doesn't tolerate overclocking very well. You should always try to kee the HTT bus speed as close to the default speed (800MHz) as possible. In your case, the default settings would be 4 x 200MHz, but if you overclock the CPU, the HTT multi has to be lowered to 3x. With this multiplier setting, you can theoretically raise the CPU freq as high as 266MHz without exceeding 800MHz HTT.

- do NOT overclock the AGP bus! Doing so can lead to all sorts of problems, not just with your video card, but with any PCI devices, onboard sound, HDDs, optical drives, etc. ALWAYS lock it at 66MHz.

- if you have any Spread Spectrum settings, disable them.

- do not tamper with RAM timings until AFTER you've settled on your CPU/overclock settings. Until then, keep them on AUTO (or default).

- lower the memory clock to 166MHz, even if you have PC3200 RAM. By doing this, you will be able to raise the CPU freq as high as 250MHz without over-overclocking the RAM (it will run at 208MHz).

- if necessary, you may have to raise the CPU voltage to stablize the overclock