I'd like to see specific guides (that are updated perhaps 2x a year)

 Okay Bob and Der, sorry its taking so long (finals just finished up for me and I have not had a lot of time otherwise with work). I finished re-vamping the first half of Bob's guide and this is what I have so far:

Overclocking 101

Version 1.0 by bob_on_the_cob, ice91785, der_meister

Disclaimer about how if you mess up your PC it is not the fault of the guide or its writers; we are not to be held accountable for any hardware issues or problems that may result.

Recommended/Required Software:

·         Temperature Monitoring Program(s)

ü  CORETEMP: This is only a viable solution when using an Intel-based Procesor; it is very basic software that will give you an idea of the temperatures of each of your cores within your Intel CPU.

ü  SPEEDFAN: Can use this temperature monitoring program with any CPU. It lays out temps in a very nice graph; bit more complicate than other but worth learning. This software also has ability to monitor fans and hard drives.

ü  MOTHERBOARD UTILITY: Chances are if you are using a non-OEM motherboard (Abit, ASUS, DFI, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.) then you probably got a disc full of utilities in the motherboard’s box – this would probably include a temperature monitoring utility. Since it is designed to work specifically with your motherboard’s sensors, often it may be the most accurate.

·         Specification/Information Program

ü  CPU-Z: This is an awesome utility that tells you anything you may need to know about the guts of your rig. It includes (but not limited to):

§  CPU make, model, frequency, multiplier, revision, voltage

§  Motherboard make, model, BIOS revision

§   RAM make, model, frequency, timings

ü  CPUBURNIN: A good program for finding maximum temperatures of your CPU. Not really the best for stability testing.

·         Stress Test/Stability Program(s)

ü  ORTHOS: Great for stability testing; puts CPU cores (up to two per instance) on a full load to verify your system is stable enough to use without crashing or locking up. If you have a quad core, simply open the program two times to test all four cores. It’s pretty user-friendly

ü  PRIME95: Not as user friendly as Orthos, but the same idea. Can only stress one core per program instance so if you have an ‘X’-core CPU, you would need to open ‘X’ instances of PRIME for 100% load. A quick google search will help show you how to accomplish this…

ü  MEMTEST86+: This you will need when you begin to overclock your rig’s RAM. It’s easiest to burn the .iso image to a CD and boot straight from it. It stressed the system’s memory to ensure its stability. Unstable memory = corrupt OS installation which can sometimes not become apparent perhaps a week or two (or more) after the original OS install.

·         Motherboard Drivers/Updates

ü  No matter the motherboard you have, you are going to want to be sure you have the latest drivers installed via the manufacturer’s website. Pay closest attention to chipset drivers and storage controller drivers. It may also be ideal to flash your BIOS to the latest version but this should be done on a case-by-case basis (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it as they say).

Hardware Requirement(s):

·         3^rd Party (or sometimes high-end OEM) Motherboard

ü  If you purchased your rig from a local or online retailer (Best Buy, Circuit City, Dell.com, etc.) chances are you probably will not be able to overclock. These motherboards are generally not as feature rich as performance motherboards are and lack the ability to overclock your hardware from the system’s BIOS.

If you plan on purchasing a decent motherboards board, some are (in no particular order): Abit, ASUS, DFI, Gigabyte, MSI, and Intel’s Bad Axe or Extreme Series. Lately, XFX and eVGA have released some pretty solid boards as well.

·         Aftermarket Processor Cooling

ü  You can use the stock Intel/AMD heatsink to begin your overclock, but generally aftermarket cooling will offer better results. A better air cooling solution (includes a heatsink with a fan) will run you about $30 to $60 USD. Decent brands to look for are: Arctic Cooling, Scyth, Tuniq, ZEROcooling, and Zalman to name a few. Thermaltake and ASUS also make some okay cooling solutions

A good watercooling solution can be $200+. I recommend getting your feet wet in the overclocking world before dropping that kind of cash.

·         Non-Raid Hard Drive Setup

ü  If you currently have a rig that has your hard drives set up in a RAID array, you need to find a way to either turn it off (without losing your data of course) or to find another rig to overclock with. I say this because part of overclocking includes pushing your system until it is no longer stable and gives you a few bad boot sequences. This will usually mess up RAID arrays (especially RAID 0). Just to be cautious use a different hard drive setup until you know what your rig can do.

·         PC Chassis with Good Air Flow

ü  The better the air flow through your rig, the better overclocking results you will achieve. Good airflow = good temperatures. Good temperatures = higher overclock. You want to find a case that has intake and exhaust vents, and air can linearly find its way across the inside of the case. I sniped a picture from google images to show what I mean:

Looking at the above picture shows the linearity of airflow you want to achieve. If you are using a case that has fans on the side-panel, I would generally use these as intake fans. If you are using a case that has a blow-hole on the top, I would use that as an exhaust. Don’t get too fan crazy though as more than 4 fans (to me anyway) turns your rig into a jet plane sounding like its ready to take off and can be very loud.

Another thing that many people are lacking in their case is good wire management. It will obviously be tough for air to easily flow through a case if there are cables blocking this flow. Tie down and tuck all your extra cabling from your PSU, HDDs, and optical drives.  If you want to see the best of the best, Hothardware’s Sladesurfer is probably the most amazing I have seen. Some of his work can be seen at http://hothardware.com/cs/forums/p/35237/287501.aspx#287501

It looks good, I like the airflow piucture at the bottom. good case airflow makes all the diffrence.

just added some stuff that i thought was missing. please excuse any grammar or spelling mistakes. i did not type this in ms word, however i should be able to fix it up a bit if you guys like what i added.  

tempreture monitoring programs

amd overdrive-  only on amd systems, and only if your motherboard supports it. allows you to monitor activity levels and tempretures for each individual core.  amd overdrive also allows you to change settings such as fan speed, voltage, fsb, and multiplier (both for individual core, and for all the cores) on the fly in windows. it also provides a basic stress test to see if the overclock is stable (it is still better to double check using another stress test though).

pc chasis with good airflow

wires can abstruct airflow, and create clutter in an otherwise beautiful case. to maximize airflow, and style you should use zip ties to hide away wires.
1- take a group of wires that are in the way of airflow, or that you believe are ruining the look of your rig 
2- using a zip tie attach them to the sides of your case. most pc cases have small holes either along the motherboard tray, or along the 5.25 drive bays (the cd/dvd and hard drive, drive bays) you should attempt to attach the wires to these holes for a cleaner and neater look, however be carefull not to block airflow if you have a fan in your hard drive bay! if you cant find any holes you should try to put the wires behind the case (behind the case being the side that doesnt give you access to any hardware components). 

a modular psu (power supply unit) will also help with clutter and airflow. modular power supplies give users the option of using only the power connectors that they need. this will reduce the amount of wires in your case, create better airflow, make your case look nicer, and give you less headaches.









also, i know i havent been too active in this thread (im still in finals week :-( ) but can you give me something that i can write about? in about 2 weeks i should be able to have a final, or close to final piece. 
also, as far as im aware this is the format right?
general overview
more in depth overview
amd and intel specific guide
video card guide


also, i think we should create a list of recomended parts. ie, in our experience "xxxx" is great for "xxxx". that way if people are unsure of what to get we can guide them to a choice (i know they can post questions in the forum to ask, but this seems like less hassle).  

i see some other stuff that i could add to bobs guide if you guys want my help. im unsure of how the order is going, and what to expect though.  

Yes you are definitely more than welcome to participate as this is a community OC guide basically -- i assume you know quite a bit about AMD stuff (seeing as your avatar was an x2 forever ). Perhaps you could write up an AMD segment?

For the rest of what you write I like most of it and will definitely try to integrate it in.

You are also correct on the format with overview, specific CPU OCing, vid card.

The recommended parts would be fine if they have staying power (CPU coolers or cases) but for things like mobos, CPUs and RAM -- these generally evolve too fast to keep up. That said, the initial idea was to update the thread 2x a year -- I think changing it around more would eventually become tedius and less easy to read. Keep in mind we have a forum also that people can definitely post to and ask about the latest and greatest.

I do welcome all ideas and would really like to make this a community guide so it can be nothing but great!

i have a pehnom and can write about that, the motherboard isnt too good though and is limiting results. i should be able to write a general guide, i still get an overclock of 300+ mhz though (from 2.4 to 2.7) 

id also love to help with the video card guide. :-)

just thinking about this, it seems to easy..... i remember when i started to overclock..... oh boy.... 
 

ice_73:

just thinking about this, it seems to easy..... i remember when i started to overclock..... oh boy.... 

Thats kinda what i was thinking -- initially its very overwhelming but once you get the hang of a certain family its a cake-walk to learn from there. Of course you have to re-learn when new CPU families are released (it was odd knowing how to OC my A64 to a "T" and then switching to a C2D system and being half-clueless...)

I re-edited the part above to include what you said about modular PSUs and such. I tried to past it here but a bunch of .asp garbage pops up.....I guess if you want me to I can email you what I have if you were interested.

....hmm it seems even after removing my text the stuff is still there -- Dave, Marco can ya tell me what is going on here?

hmm, i guess email would be best. 

yeah that .asp garbage doesnt look too pretty, perhaps your overclock isnt stable  

edit- ice, for some odd strange reason, in gmail it works kind of, i still see garbage, but some images pop through 

Looks great!

Gents,

Do NOT cut and paste anything into the editor from MS Word or any other Office app for that matter (outlook etc).  The engine isn't recognizing the font formatting and it's pasting it in as text.

Please use Notepad to paste to first and then cut and paste from that if need be.  Then the built in editor here will have anything you need to other font styling etc.

Thanks!

So what happend to the guide?...I want to read it in all of its finished glory!

mentaldisorder:

So what happend to the guide?...I want to read it in all of its finished glory!

I'm reviving this...So what happened to that update?  Do you need help finishing it off?  Post what you have and we can iron everything out, or pm it to us.

Hi guys, would like to see some more info  of an overclocking guide here as well.

Awesome guide and an impressive effort by those involved.

I'm glad this was brought to the front and would love to see a stickied version.

I think a bit more on when and why you would want to overclock and what the risks are might be would be great. There was one good paragraph that mentions computer life expectancy dropping and squeezing a little extra life out of an older computer. I'm guessing my current 10 yr. old Dell would be entirely unsuitable even if I'm perfectly willing to risk torching it. However going forward I could be thinking of Overclocking a newer system once it starts to get long in the tooth if it means I could play modern games longer without doing a complete overhaul of my system every few years. Does overclocking lend itself to saving some coin or is it something that people mostly do for the love of having the fastest computer they can have?

Resin:

Awesome guide and an impressive effort by those involved.

I'm glad this was brought to the front and would love to see a stickied version.

I think a bit more on when and why you would want to overclock and what the risks are might be would be great. There was one good paragraph that mentions computer life expectancy dropping and squeezing a little extra life out of an older computer. I'm guessing my current 10 yr. old Dell would be entirely unsuitable even if I'm perfectly willing to risk torching it. However going forward I could be thinking of Overclocking a newer system once it starts to get long in the tooth if it means I could play modern games longer without doing a complete overhaul of my system every few years. Does overclocking lend itself to saving some coin or is it something that people mostly do for the love of having the fastest computer they can have?

What guide is this please?  Link?  I'll sticky it up for youz. 

I was just talking about bob_on_the_cobs overclocking basics on page 2 of this thread and some of the additions on cooling from page 3. It looks like a rough draft that they were planning to finish, the finished version is what I would like to see stickied (when finished).

What do you folks think about me setting up an entire "Guides" forum section???  

Dave_HH:

What do you folks think about me setting up an entire "Guides" forum section???  

I think that would be a great idea!

 Maybe you could mention it in the next podcast  that you may be looking for some input in creating a "Guides" section in the forums 

I would like to help where I can.

rrplay:

Dave_HH:

What do you folks think about me setting up an entire "Guides" forum section???  

I think that would be a great idea!

 Maybe you could mention it in the next podcast  that you may be looking for some input in creating a "Guides" section in the forums 

I would like to help where I can.

Sounds like a plan.

+1

I'd love to see a guides section.  Bob has been working on this guide for quite sometime now and I was hoping that one of us could finalize it.  To be honest, I think he forgot about it.

I wonder what  happened to my previous post  intended as a supplement to this guide ?

there are 2 relatively new threads  started to possibly revive an interest here

Bios settings for overclocking your rig. (A guide for the rest of us)

http://hothardware.com/cs/forums/t/53962.aspx?PageIndex=1


Overclocking Video Cards - Monitoring Temps and Stability

http://hothardware.com/cs/forums/t/54045.aspx

maybe be various contributions to these threads and others[N>B  Fan thread aka Sammy fans/] we may have some amazing results in the end.

Not replying to a necro-thread for fun, but because I believe the OP's first points are still valid.  Those would be awesome guides to see today.