I recently bought this system: Pentium 4 2.6c 512mb OCZ PC4000 Gold Dual channel ram MSI 865pe Neo-2 motherboard Win XP Pro SP1 Basically I'm looking for some kind soul out there to suggest the best settings to have my system at(with regards to FSB, DRAM timings, voltages etc). Either that or direct me to a decent guide to overclocking. This motherboard comes with a dynamic overclocking facility as well, should i use this? (Also one thing worrying me is the temp my cpu is showing. Sitting at idle, it shows approx 52c in BIOS, using the MSI Core centre program for XP, it shows 43c. Is this a little too hot? I'm using the akaska 670cu HSF which is rated to 3.0Ghz)

You have a decent set up to overclock. But the first thing you want to make sure is the CPU temp is correct. In my experience, MSI boards tend to exaggurating temp, even with CoreCenter display. However, you need to check to see if your heat sink is in full contact with your CPU and if it operates effectively. I'd disable the Dynamic Overclock feature in the BIOS set up. I'm not familiar with 865PE board, but I believe you can set performance mode in Voltage and Frequency just as that of my 875P board, you should be able to set the FSB and PCI frequencies also in there. With your system, you should be able to set the performance to slow and easily rev up the FSB to 250MHz (slowly, maybe 10MHz at a time) without even touch Vcore and other voltage settings. I think you need to tune down the PCI to 33 or 35MHz. Then you need to get into Chipset Features or something like that to set your memory timings (disable detection by SPD). OCZ DDR500 gold has a CL of 2.5, so I would try 2.5-4-4-8-8 in there or even 2.5-3-3-8-8. If these settings give you a stable system, congratulations! You just overclocked your computer. You should be able to get your CPU up to 3.2 GHz without increase voltages, maybe even higher. You may want to try performance mode in Fast, Turbo or UltraTurbo to see if you can get better performance. My 2.4C with 875P Neo-FIR2S and HyperX4000 can run at FSB 266MHz with 2.5-4-4-8-8 and default voltages, but only in slow mode, other modes won't even boot. BYW, my FSB:DRAM=5:4 so my ram runs at 426MHz, way below its capability, but the board is probably maxed out.

Well, follow-up with my last post, not regarding 865PE, but 875P board. Apparently I didn't know MSI recently (on Sept.8) posted BIOS 1.8 for the board. I just saw it during lunch time and flashed my board with it. It says on MSI's website the V1.8 fixes ICH5 RAID1, but I think it has improvments in other aspects also, at least in FSB setting. Now I can get FSB up to 280 without raising voltages. I don't have time to test the stability of the system, I'll do it when I have time. Now only if I can get my RAM to run at its default frequency!

Core center in windows will tell you a lower temp cause when idleing in windows the temp is lower than the BIOS. The BIOS will make your CPU run close to %100.