Overclocking

[devilslayersbane]

So, I'm kinda new to overclocking and I'm afraid to hurt my system, especially since my laptop is currently out of the picture and I don't have the money to replace the parts on my system. So I would like some advice on overclocking my CPU (specs at the end of post). Currently, under a stress test (running at 3.5 Ghz) the CPU temps hover around 49-52 degrees Celsius. This is at about 73-89% CPU usage (according to Speed fan and CPUID). The max Turbo-boosted speed is 3.9 Ghz. My cooler is the thermaltake frio. Any advice is welcome.

 

System specs:

Asus Sabertooth X79 Motherboard

Intel i-7 3930k Sandy Bridge-E

16 GB DDR3 RAM Crucial Ballistix Sport

EVGA GTX 970 SSC

700 Watt Power Supply

1TB Western Digital Caviar Black

1TB Samsung Desktop Class Spinpoint F3

240GB PNY Optima SSD

[Einstein]

Before anyone jumps in here and yells (or otherwise states) that HOLY CRAP IDIOT YOU SHOULD NEVER OVERCLACK YOULL BURN THE WORLD!!!11!ELEVEN, please realize that he did ask advice on how to safely do it, meaning that he's going to. Just thought I'd throw that in first since most threads like this have at least one naysayer that gets pissed off because someone else is OC'ing. It'll be ok.

 

/shortrant

 

The first thing I would do is google your particular CPU and see what others have achieved, and read what all they went through to do it. Lots of Asus boards like yours (the sabertooth is pretty high end) allow for "safe" overclocking, in a sort of "stepped" manner. In other words, sometimes it just knows right away when you open the OC utility that X speed is safe and gives you an option to do it. This is safer than manually editing values. In the case of my old machine, it ran 3.2 out of the box, and had a "safe step" that the board detected as 3.7. I hit go and it rebooted and said the changes had applied successfully. It also said that 3.9 might be possible. Tried it and it failed. Reverted to 3.7 and ran it for 3 years like that before I sold it last year to a guy who is still running it at 3.7 with no problems (AMD Phenom X6 1090T on a Asus Crosshair IV btw). If yours has anything like that available then thats the way I would do it. If you want more and want to get into manually OC'ing....just be very careful and read as much as you can about your particular chip AND the combination of it with your board and boards with the same chipset as yours.

[System Error Message]

best to read the overclocking guide for your CPU.

Dont increase voltage unless you really have to. Always keep your voltage below the safe voltage limit for your CPU (it would be mentioned in the guide)

Make sure you have a good stable PSU. Even a 20% overclock can cause a 50% increase in CPU power use if you overvolt. This means that a 60W TDP CPU will use 90W.

 

Lock the timings of other devices like ram and such.

 

Overclocking is a tedious process, you overclock each component one at a time.

 

Never overclock your PCIe, PCI, hard drive/ southbridge busses unless you really have to. Lock them to their default spec frequencies. Overclock the CPU multiplier first, some busses can be overclocked but they usually dont handle it well.