Rampage Formula / E8400 - 1st OC

[sbrown1]

As the topic says, I want to jump into my first overclock. I am not looking to be overly aggessive, I would be happy to take my proc to a nice and stable 3.6ghz-3.8ghz from the stock 3ghz. I am using an Arctic Pro7 for air cooling. Again, I do not want to risk upping the voltage to high, so that is why I am asking for help here. Can you guys give me some advice on safe settings? Also, do I need to do anything with the ram settings?

Thanks in advance!

Asus Rampage Formula
Wolfdale E8400 Proc
Arctic Pro7 Cooler
Thermaltake 750W PS
G.Skill PC2 8500 4Gigs
EvGA 8800GTS 512 (G92)

[speedfreak86]

I have always taken the approach of finding an overclock of the FSB that fits what it is that you want on the high side (so say like 400-422 in your case) but also gives you essentially the rated speed of your ram based on one of the available memory dividers. Take and lower your multi down to 6X and set the FSB to what you want. Set all bios voltages for nb, sb, and processor to their values that are closest to the auto values (this prevents boards that adjust based on overclocks from really cranking the volts up without you knowin it) and the ram to its rated voltage. When you start the computer, hopefully it will post and you can get to your operating system, if not adjust your northbridge voltage up slightly. Work this way until you are able to test the FSB overclock to be stable in Windows. Keep in mind you may have to adjust some CPU voltages too depending on the FSB level you select (yours will probably do 400 easily on the voltages given as is.) Anyway, once you get this stable, you can pretty much assume that the northbridge will handle the speed and then you can begin to raise the multiplier one step at a time and continue to test for stability as you go up and raise the cpu voltage as required. When you get to the top multi, you hopefully understand the process of guess and check better and several good settings of various multipliers to fall back on. Basically just do some engineering guess and check and take good notes of what helps and what hurts as you work your way up.

I believe most here will tell you to avoid going over 1.4 volts on the core of your processor. Do some searching around to find other settings which work for your motherboard as far as more advanced voltages and settings.