How 2 OC... Not quite answered....

I have been searching the forums, and have read the stickies about ocing. However, no post explains the process behind OCing, like going into the BIOS and changing the settings, how much to change them, and which ones to change....

Can anyone give me a link or some advice on how to OC?? I have looked tons of places(maybe I'm blind...) but I haven't found a definitive guide, like a step by step process yet. Please help.

Refer 2 sig if u need 2 know my sys specs....

Everything you need to know about bios (I think): http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/BIOS_Guide/BIOS_Guide_Index.htm

*In general*, once you get into the bios on startup, you will need to navigate the different pages until you get to the chipset features page or advanced options. In there you will see options to user define some settings like front side bus, CPU multiplier, DRAM voltage and CPU voltage, maybe a few others.

If you have an Intel chip, you will only be able to OC via the bus speed. The general method is to bump the bus speed by 5MHz each time you start up and test for stability using some sort of stress program (CPUburn or Sandra for CPUs, Memtest86 for your memory, looping 3Dmark for your graphics). Run it for an hour or so or until temps stabilize and you're happy with it. Once it starts going unstable, back off 5Mhz and then increase it one at a time until you hit the limit. Since you have an 875P chipset, you should have a PCI/AGP lock (enable it definitely). This will eliminate the problems of instability caused by PCI/AGP devices not cooperating nicely. This means the possible sources of instability will be your chipset, CPU, or ram. A subset of each would be either chip limitations or cooling limitations.

Ram timings are another issue entirely, and you can find info on tweaking that in the memory section.

Hope this gets you started.

No cookbook recipe for overclocking because it's a fine art. Every brand of motherboard and sometimes even different models/chipsets have different BIOS settings and menus. Older motherboards used dip switches or jumpers to change the settings. So, that's another reason there is a lack of specific instructions. You have a Gigabyte mobo, so maybe check out the Gigabyte motherboard section for more insight on your BIOS settings. Maybe read the manual. Good luck.

What they said, and with a Gigabyte MB you'l most likely have to press Ctrl+F1 AFTER your in Bios to access 'Avdanced Chipset' menu which usualy is the memory timings and such.

In my experience with Giga's / p4's / Pentium chipsets, Memory Bandwidth is much more important than Latency. In otherwords the higher your memory bandwidth~the more successful your O/C will be.

New P4 chips have the ability to consume very generous amounts of memory to process so the bigger the highway the happier it will be. It prefers more traffic not neccessarily faster traffic.

And be careful with volts on cpu~but you'll read about that elsewhere. Follow those links and browse some more.

Very important to understand as well is that even within the same brands it is luck of the draw. If you bought 5 of the same chip, mobo, and ram. You'd get different O/c's with each set.

Good luck!

i found out that my timings are 3:3:3:8, that should be good enough shouldn't it? I don't wanna change em really, seems that if you do, you get some system instablitity.... I don't need to oc more than 500Mhz, if I do, i would get the pc4400 or something like that....

With those timings you should be able to turn it up! That is a good balance, any faster and it tends to choke on the bandwidth at high FSB.

Who knows though ~ I'd get your Processor up to desired speed, then see if you can drop your timings and stay stable. Remember to up vdimm (memory volts) with more memory bandwidth to make it stable. If your running it fast give it a +.1v, or +.2v to satisfy it's needs.

ok, thx. any other setting that i might have to change that i should know about??