Noob-can i and how to oc fx 8350 and 7870

Hardware Overclocking
1

Hi im new to the tek forum bought my first gaming pc this summer and my specs are listed below:

gigabyte ga 970a ud3 mb

radeon hd 7870 (gigabyte)

amd fx 8350

corsair h60 cpu water cooling

corsair 16 gb ddr3 ram

650 watt ps hale 82 (bronze 80+)

2 tb hd

optical drive

i have 2 case fans (not sure what case exactly, AZZA brand)

creative xi-fi soundblaster sound card

Im just getting ready to go to college and would like to increase my pc's performance without spending a whole lot of cash. I was needing help knowing what programs to use to oc and where to download them from, as well as wether i would be better overclocking my 7870 or if id be better off just running crossfire and buying a new motherboard, gpu cooling unit and psu? and if i overclock my cpu and gpu what i could expect to overclock them to and how much it would increase performance? Is it worth it, and would overclocking require more energy? thanks! im just getting ready to go to college and would like to increase my pc's performance without spending a whole lot of cash

2

With the gpu use msi afterburner to overclock it.

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

With the cpu you will have to use the bios to overclock.

3

okay but if my gpu is a gigabyte brand can i still use msi afterburner?

 

4

Yes, MSI Afterburner works on essentially all GPUs.

5

okay thanks, also when setting the cpu overclock what exactly optimizes performance and which parts should be overclocked (ie bclk clock control, cpu northbridge frequency, ht link frequency or the cpu clock ratio)?

6

or the system memory multiplier

 

7

CPU clock ratio, if you want the simple way, or BCLK if you want an even easier way.

8

okay sweet thanks, btw what do you think a good overclock would be on my system that wouldnt fry it?

9

bump up the cpu multiplier antill you hit 4.5Ghz boot the computer and stress test with ada 64 for a couple of hours checking your cpu temps with http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/hwinfo64.html and speed fan http://www.filehippo.com/download_speedfan/ allso leave cpu-z open to see if your cpu is throttleing speed down or fluctuateing masively