Please can somebody give me a good advice how can I overclock & upgrade my CPU. Below are the specifications of my computer: Moth: Gigabyte K8NS Pro - NForce3 250 CPU: AMD Athlon64 2800+ Ram: Kingston 2x512 DDR400 Kit Graphic: Asus FX5700 LE 256mb AGP 8x HDD: Maxtor 80gb IDE 7200/ 8mb cache HDD: Maxtor 160gb SATA 7200/8mb cache CPU fan :Coolermaster (came with processor box) 3 case fans (Titan) HDD fan I plan bying Zalman 12 inches all copper for the CPU and a better Aluminium case + Chieftech power supply 420 watts, my current powersupply (Colorsit) is 350 watts. Thank you macence malo

"I plan bying Zalman 12 inches all copper for the CPU and a better Aluminium case + Chieftech power supply 420 watts" The Zalman is unnecessary. CoolerMaster makes an excellent line of products. Does it look something like this one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835103167 The PSU is probably THE most important piece of hardware in the case & Chieftech is not a great brand. I suggest you take the money you were gonna "waste" on the Zalman & invest in a decent PSU instead. The CPU multiplier on the A64 is 1/2-locked..that is, locked above the default setting, but should be unlocked for the lower settings. The HTT bus doesn't tolerate overclocking very well, so you should try to keep it reasonably close to 800Mhz. Your current setting are probably CPU Freq at 200MHz, HTT multiplier at 4x (200 x 4 = 800). If you lower the HTT multi to 3x (unfortunately there are no x.5 settings), you'll have all sorts of room to play with the CPU Freq. Your RAM will hold you back though, unless you run async (CPU at one bus speed, RAM at another). Here's an example for running your CPU at 2.0GHz: CPU freq = 250MHz CPU multi = 8x HTT multi = 3x - I highly doubt your PC3200 will run at 250MHz, so you'll have to change the CPU:DRAM ratio to something other than 1:1 - CPU voltage (vcore) may have to be increased to stabilize the overclock This article should help: http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&number=1&artpage=965&articID=250 R.I.P. Eddie Guerrero "Viva La Raza"

Isn't the Athlon64 2800+ (socket 754) running at 1800MHz with a multiplier of 9x ??? Otherwise Jam mentioned most of the important sttings but if you lower the Ram speed you also need to set the CL number of the Ram manually. Otherwise the board would automatically detect a lower CL setting for the lowerered Ram clock but with the OC that will go up again too and the lower CL settings will not work! The problem is that the socket 754 Athlon64 are not that good to OC like thos socket 939 winchester and venice core because they are still build in 130nm technology. If you need more gameing power you should think about a faster graphic card first. As I see it the 256MB of your FX5700 LE will bring you less that a normal FX5700 with 128MB would have done. Even the FX5700 is no longer a very fast card and the LE is always an clocked down model and often with even less pixel pipelines too. You may still need a better psu but should give it try with the old one first. Best you compare the ampere output with the psu you intend to buy and if it's not that much worse see if the system is still stable. The problem is the wattage of the psu may lead you into a very wrong direction. A while ago I needed a better psu and the first one I found was a 550W Q-Tec for a very nice price. Luckily I found a test too and learned they just justed used a short time peak output to calculate the wattage and in the test it lost against most of the 350W psu. Instead I bought a Tagan 380W that has an ampere output that's compareable with those of most of the 550W psu and in a stress test on another test it even put out about 40% more on the already high 12V reading! Just to give you an impression: I have a 6600GT in my Athlon64 3000+ Winchester (socket 939) and building a new system for a friend lately I was able to compare it with a 6800GT. That one brought nearly double the score of my 6600GT using the 3DMark 05 Benchmark! Or as another example I build a FX5900XT into my old Athlon Thunderbird 1,2@1,33GHz with 512MB SD Ram at the beginning of 2004. After that I was able to run games like Need for Speed Underground2 and others I barely made the minimal CPU requirements and full or at least very high graphic settings using a resolution of 1280x1024 which is the maximam that makes any sense on my 17" monitor. I would have been able to OC that card from 390/700MHz to 482/813MHz or maybe even a bit higher to get even better results but just didn't need them at that time! That just to show you the importance of a good graphic card with modern games. They really do most of the work at gaming today!