After failing spectacularly at my first attempt to overclock my Phenom 2 965, I am making anouther attempt. Right now, I am running at 3800MHz with the voltage set to "auto". my CPU nb is at 2400, with the voltage just over 1.23. How high will I need to take the voltage to reach 4.0 GHz, and should i change any other settings, like the HT link, or the RAM settings?
Well, overclocking really varies from one chip to another, even if it's the same exact model with the same exact steppings. When overclocking, I wouldn't let voltage be handled by "Auto," in my experience, "auto" has done some whacky things. For the Phenom II's, most people need around 1.45v (give or take .5) to get 4GHz. Unless you're an extreme overclocker, leave the HT Link and RAM settings alone. I'm actually very surprised it's stable at 3.8GHz @ 1.23v, considering stock voltage is 1.4v. Is it stable? Here is a review from AnandTech with their OC results:
The stock Core VDDC (VCore) is 1.4V as delivered from AMD. At this stock voltage and a slight bump in NB Core voltage to 1.250V, we hit 3.8GHz with a 2.6GHz Northbridge speed on our MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard...
Our particular sample made it to 4.2GHz on 1.50V with a NB speed of 2.4GHz using our Vigor Monsoon III LT air cooler
For testing stability, run Prime95 (Blend test) for 24 hours. If it passes without error, it's rock solid stable. I'm going to guess your current OC will fail within 15 minutes.
My CPU voltage is at 1.4 volts, it is my NB voltage that is at 1.23. I'm not trying to overclock to 3.8 on an undervolt.