3 Step Overclocking Guide – Bloomfield and Gulftown

97 CommentsBy miahallen

closeAuthor: miahallen Name: Jeremiah Allen
Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com
Site: http://www.ironmods.com
About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role. My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable! Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world. The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles. After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei. My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on September 7, 2010

Introduction

So many users are searching around the net these days looking for advice on how to overclock their new systems but don’t know where to start. To help everyone out, I decided a how-to guide was in order. Searching around forums can be confusing and intimidating. There are so many people willing to give advice, but who can you trust? It’s hard to know, and I’ve seen many users sent on wild goose chases because they are following advice that doesn’t solve or even address their specific problem. I’ve also seen too much trial and error overclocking, unless you get lucky it tends to be far too time consuming a frustrating. What I’ve attempted to do is create a very simple three step guide for overclocking Bloomfield and Gulftown based CPUs. If you want to continue searching out other opinions, please consider each suggestion with caution. Some will undoubtedly be great, some will not.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible for any bad things that happen to you or your computer as a result of you following this guide, nor is techreaction.net. My goal is for this guide to be a safe overclocking guideline, but the burden for damaged hardware lies on the user performing the overclock! Overclocking can damage hardware and in most cases will void your warranties.

Prerequisites

In an earlier version of this guide, I requested that you have some basic knowledge of your motherboards BIOS. While I have not addressed every motherboard on the market, I have included details for the top enthusiast brands. But as before, please do not be afraid to get into your BIOS and have a look around, if you are ever concerned that you may have changed a setting erroneously, you can always load defaults, and start over. Most boards have a CMOS reset button on them now-a-days, if not check your user manual for the location of the CMOS reset jumper…please ensure you know the location before getting started.

This guide is independent of your cooling system. Whether you are using the stock Intel cooler or if you’re pushing to the extreme with phase change cooling, the basic steps remain the same. One thing that is far too common are mistakes mounting your cooling system, specifically the application of the thermal interface material (TIM). If you don’t have much experience mounting cooling apparatus, please refer to this excellent guide from Arctic Silver.

Methodology

Determining methods for finding a stable overclock are highly controversial, everyone has their own definition of a stable system, but when I refer to “stable” in this guide, I am referring to the stability of your selected “stability test.” So for a power user or gamer who wants a reliable system that won’t ever crash due to an overclock pushed too far, you’d need to test with a program that will load all of the cores and threads applicable to your CPU, OCCT and IntelBurnTest are two popular choices. OCCT uses the same algorithm as Prime95 but has a more friendly interface. IntelBurnTest uses the Intel linpak binaries to stress the system and also has an easy to use interface. In this guide I may use testing this is insufficient in your opinion. It is only a guidline and if you feel more testing is necessary for your system, by all means feel free.

So with that in mind, we will attempt to isolate each portion of the system and overclock one step at a time. This may seem time consuming at first glance, but rest assured this will potentially save you hours of troubleshooting and frustration. So go slow, and follow each step very carefully.

BIOS familiarization

If you’ve found my guide online, my guess is you’re looking for more than a basic overclock. If you’re not, and all you’d like is something simple, please redirect your attention to your motherboard manufacturer’s website and download the latest overclocking utility. For basic 10-20% overclocking, they work pretty well. There is “Gigabyte EasyTune6“, “Asus TurboV EVO“, “MSI Control Center“, and “eVGA eleet“. This guide is written to take it to the next level, for THAT we need to do the overclocking from the BIOS.

Speaking of which, before we begin, please check your motherboard manufacturer’s website for the latest version of your BIOS. Usually enthusiast level boards will have BIOS engineers tweaking them for months or years to improve overclocking support. Unless you have a reason to stay with your current BIOS, I’d update to the newest version.

If you don’t know how to access the BIOS, please refer to your motherboard’s owner’s manual for instruction. While you’re there, find out how to “clear CMOS”. As I mentioned in the introduction to this guide, it’s important you know how to properly “clear CMOS” before we begin.

Secondly, the first thing to do after powering up the new system is to enter the BIOS and find the “hardware monitor” area and verify the CPU temperature is reasonable based on your cooling. If not, please power down the system and verify the mounting of your cooling apparatus (refer to the guide linked in the “prerequisites” section above).

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CATEGORIES: Gaming, Guides, Intel, Motherboards & Chipsets, Overclocking, Processors
TAGS: 1156, 1366, AMD, best choice, best CPU, Bloomfield, Budget, buyers guide, buying guide, Clarkdale, guide, Gulftown, H55, H57, i3, i5, i7, Intel, Lynnfield, Nehalem, P55, value, Westmere, X58

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