Overclock my aging pc

[Simon1987]

I heard these e6600 were good easy clockers.

Hardware is

e6600
gigabyte P35-DS4
2x1gig cosair CM2X1024-6400C4
tagan 500w psu

info here
http://www.mike65.ukfsn.org/main/uploads/files/bios/

on picture DSCF4594 should i enable cpu host clock control and then start upping the fsb? or is there anything else ishould change first?

[Ulti]

Yup, you'll want to set the "System Memory Multiplier" to something like 533/667 whilst you're overclocking the FSB though otherwise your RAM will be overclocking with the CPU and that will likely lead to instability.

You may also want to manually set your voltages too.

[Simon1987]

I can set it to either 533 or 667? I'm guessing 667.

Also whats a "good" start fsb for these chips? Or should I just take it slow and up it in 5 increments?

[scaryjim]

When the thread title said aging I assumed this was going to be about OCing an Athlon XP / Pentium 4! AH, the youth of today...

Your memory clock rises directly with your FSB. From memory, the E6600 runs on a 1066 FSB which means you start with a 266MHz base clock. To run your memory at DDR800, this is mutlipled by 3/2 to set an actually memory clock of 400MHz. If you start upping the FSB without changing the memory you'll start overclocking the memory by 1.5MHz for each 1MHz you increase the base clock, and since memory tends to be a lot more sensitive to overclocking than a CPU this will limit your potential overclock.

If you set the memory speed to 667 your memory multiplier will change to 5/4. This means that you can raise the base clock to 320 before you reach 400MHz on the memory. If you set the memory speed to 533, it changes your memory multipler to 1, which means you can potentially go right up to 400MHz base clock (== 1600Mhz FSB!) before you start overclocking your memory.

The usual advice is to set a 1:1 ratio (i.e. 533MHz memory clock) in the BIOS before overclocking to remove any risk of memory instability, and find your best CPU overclock. You can then think about changing the memory speed (e.g. if you can only get the FSB to ~ 300MHz you can change the memory to 667 and it'll still be slightly underclocked).

The important thing is to make sure you have a decent aftermarket cooler and a temperature monitoring program like CoreTemp, SpeedFan etc. A stock Intel cooler will struggle with the extra heat created by overclocking.

For a better explanation of the factors involved in overclocking a Core 2 Duo, read Clunk's Overclocking Guide (a sticky in this forum!)