Quote Originally Posted by jaggerwild View Post
Hey guys!
First time poster, Be gentle.Been following this link a while now, I'm a noob with this board and never had a Sapphire 3870X2 or any ATI cards before. So I have a few questions
1. Whats the best way to OC the GPU, apps,drivers,etc........
first you can OC the driver...i say that with nvidia in mind and i expect ATI would allow the same with their driver.

next, OC the GPU itself but more heat will be produced...you might need higher PCIe voltage to support that overclocking of the GPU

last way to OC the video card is increasing your PCIe bus speed....i wouldn't go to high here...i would try up to about 108 or 109 mhz...doing this means you overclock the entire PCIe bus and everything that lives off that bus.

2. in the bios(i have F6) I try to up my FSB, and it ups the mem also? How do I get around this? Or lower the mem speed as I have the G-skill 1066 and think they can't OC well at all. mem timings 5-5-5-15-T2 V2.2
definitely drop your memory divider...it is very simple way to keep from overclocking your memory beyond specs.

Couple things you should know I came from the failed GA-680SLI-DQ6 Ver2 board, so I'm comfy in the bios. There's just way to much stuff in there,
if you are talking about the X48 bios then you haven't seen a DFI X38/X48 bios to compare that against...DFI's bios will burn all your circuit breakers up in your brain