This is copied off facebook where I was helping my friend OC his Phenom, hopefully it helps
Ayt basically, there's 3 main parts to an OC.
- Frequency
- voltage
- Heat
Frequency is how fast your CPU/GPU/RAM/Anything is running. A stock Phenom ii x4 955 is running at 3.2Ghz (3200Mhz). This is worked out by a base clock, and a multiplier. So by this reckoning, we get 3.2Ghz by doing 200x16. 200 = Base clock and 16 = multi. Now, to overclock we simply up one of these, and wallah, OC. If we raised the multi to 17, we would now be at 3.4Ghz (200x17). If we raised the base by 1, we would be at 3.216Ghz (3216Mhz) (201x16).
You still with me..? xD
Now, everything in your PC uses electricity to run. At stock, a Phenom uses 1.3v (Volts). When overclocking, you get to a point where you PC becomes unstable, it can't boot into wndows anymore, or when you open something it instanty crashes. This would happen around 3.6Ghz for the Phenom... This is where you up your voltage. If we now upped the vCore (Voltage) to 1.4v, we would be able to get into windows again, and everything would be fine. Now we could prolly go to like 3.7/3.8Ghz before it started shitting itself again ~ Then we just up the vCore again, and wallah, stable 1.5v is about as far as you can go without fear of killing your CPU, but sometimes 1.52v can mean the difference between 3.95hz and the 4Ghz milestone xDD
Now.
Incresing frequency at stock voltage has NO EFFECT on heat. If your CPU was @25 idle/50 load, and you just upped the Freq to 3.5Ghz without touching anything else, it would still be at 25idle/50load. BUT. Once you start putting more volts through it, it starts getting hotter. This is where you need better cooling, since 60 oh-C is what I'm comfortable with in a CPU... GPUs (Graphics cards) can cope with alot more, but Processors should be kept under 60 degrees... Also, a note on temps, you temperature is affected not only by vCore, but also by how hot your room is. As a rule of thumb, each degree you loose in room temps, you loose in PC temps, so if you see someone posting temps on a forum somewhere, always ask for their ambient temp since they could have that PC in a room @ like 10 degrees...
Hope you learned something
And I just though I'd throw in the ''Silicon lottery''...
All chips (GPU, CPU) are different from eachother. I can have a phenom that does 4.0Ghz @1.3v, but that doesn't mean yours will too... Sometime you get a bad one, that won't even do 3.6Ghz @1.6v... It's all luck...
need a cheer up haha
