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I am just getting into overclocking but have a lot of questions that are gonna sound dumb, but hey...i gotta learn sometime....i have a new system that i just built with a soyo dragon ultra motherboard (kt333), 256mb pc2700 ddr sdram, an amd xp 2000+ cpu with a Dr. Thermal Ti – V77N CPU Cooler with Arctic Silver 3 as the thermal goo...i have great airflow in my system also..there is a 80mm front intake fan, a 92mm and 80mm side intake fan, a 80mm back exhaust fan, and two 92mm top blowholes....I have tried to read up on overclocking as much as I could, but there are still many things that I want to know before i go frying my new 140 dollar cpu....I would greatly appreciate any of your incredible knowledge that you could give to an overclocking rookie like myself, or at least the adress of a site that I can read about overclocking in detail enough to learn all that I need...thanks

ok...for the questions

1)As you increase the fsb, i know that the voltage has to increase also...but i have no clue of how much it should increase, or anything of that nature

2)If you turn the fsb up, it increases the speed of the whole mobo, right? So your ram would be sped up also, which would require you to turn the voltage on that up too....i think...somebody please set me straight...

3)What exactly does unlocking a cpu do for you, and is it nescesary to do to overclock it?

4)What is the desired temperature to keep the cpu below when it is under a load to consider it stable?

5)Is there any software out there that allows you to test you computer to see if it is reliably stable after you have overclocked it

1) General rule of thumb is to go no more than .2 over the default voltage. Some people who use extreme cooling such as water and peltiers will turn the voltage up .4 or .5 higher than defualt.

2)That is true. If you up the FSB it increases the speed the ram is running at so good fast ram is a must. It also will up the speed of the AGP/PCI buses.

3)Unlocking a CPU allows you to adjust the multiplier. My 1700+ Athlon XP ios locked at 11 with a fsb of 133 its a 1.466 gig chip. I unlocked it today so i could change the FSB upwards of 200FSB actually running it at 9x187 right now for about 1.67 gig. It isn't necessary to unlock Athlons to overclock unless you want to run extremely fast FSB speeds like that.

4)A temp of 50C and below is generally a decent temp. Of course anything below that is even better but most don't like getting above 50C or about 120 F

5)There is Sisoft Sandra, PCMark2002, 3dmark2001se those are the ones that i use. HDTach is a good one to test out your hard drives with.

Thanks for the help predator...once I unlock the cpu, how do i change the multiplier...in the bios?

In the Bios.