I am currently using an Athlon 64 3400+ Socket 754 Venice Processor, with an MSI RS480M-IL motherboard (Can be viewed here: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/... Would overclocking the processor give any decent improvement? I feel as if the CPU is not letting my Sapphire Radeon X850 XT reach its full potential. If overclocking does improve the performance, how is it done? I have never overclocked a processor nor memory before, so I am new to that. All help is appreciate.

You're not gonna overclock that board, at least not thru the BIOS. It's not made for it & doesn't have the necessary BIOS options to do it. You can try an overclocking software program like ClockGen.

And, your 3400+ is not limiting your X850XT. The CPU is more than capable of doing justice to this video card. btw, how much RAM to you have? The way games are written, they benefit more from RAM than sheer CPU speed (after of course the video card - it goes without saying!). Kailas Shastry 3000+ Venice, A8N-E, 768MB DDR266, 160GB Barracuda, 380W Cooler Master

I have 1 gb (512 X 2) ram, pc-3200 I think. Problem is, the motherboard I have, only has 2 slots so in order to upgrade I would have to sacrifice one of the 512 slots in order to add more ram. And who buys ddr ram these days? I only want to overclock my cpu temporarily till the e6320 comes out (basically the e6300 but with 4 mb l2 cache). And Jam, why isn't it overclockable? How do you know exactly? I'd really like to learn this stuff, so if you can provide me with good information I'd appreciate it.

nightscope, put simply, you need to change some settings in your BIOS (which the motherboard has) in order to overclock. What jam means is, your motherboard's BIOS does not have the option to change certain settings. He knows 'exactly' as you gave him the link to your motherboard and he has clicked on it! There is no mention of changing FSB, voltage, RAM speeds etc. It is apparent that this board is not meant for overclocking. And, going by your CPU and RAM, there is no restriction to your video card. I dont see any bottleneck to the video card's performance in your system - the X800 by today's standards is weak - you can probably look at a higher video card - a 7600GS or GT and your CPU is still powerful enough to handle games that the GPU can. Kailas Shastry 3000+ Venice, A8N-E, 768MB DDR266, 160GB Barracuda, 380W Cooler Master