I have had my PC for a good while now and from the readings i've been getting on Speccy after playing. The water cooling loop is doing a good job. the temprrature seems to always be in the 30's. In the 20's when i have my window open during the Norwegian winter. So I am very confident that overclocking will not put it in danger of overheating. I plan first to bump it up to a 3.9/4.0 GHz. If that goes well i will proceed to 4.5GHz.
My RAM is Corsair Dominator Platinum. it is supposed to be at 2133MHz but Windows 7 seems to have downclocked it to 1333. I want to at least clock the RAM up to 1866 before I overclock my processor. I know how to overclock a CPU, change the multiplier in the bios and slightly change the voltage if needed. But RAM overclocking I am less familiar with. I don't know if it is overclocking since it is supposed to run at 2133. How do I prevent windows from downclocking the ram?
But before I do all of this i need to know a few things. To be on the safe side, I would like to run a stress test on my CPU and my RAM as well if that is possible, before i overclock. So, what are the best applications out there for this task? Stress testing a last gen intel CPU.
Also, if there is something else i should be doing before overclcoking, notify me on that. I will start a new thread if I got anymore questions.
I'm no OC expert, but I Have a overclocked 3770K, I have a program that did the OC for me. Its running at 4.6 now. But it also turned down the frequency of the RAM, and from what I understand thats normal. I've tried to adjust the frequency back up, but it seems to reset.
If I'm not mistaken your motherboard/cooling decides how well you can OC.
I used Passmark for stability testing, it tests the whole computer, but it also tests the CPU in different ways like math and encryption.
If you really want to have complete control over the OC you should be doing it through BIOS. That was the software does not get a say in what it thinks is right.
Your ram is probably just running at that speed because the XMP is set to something lower than the standard for your RAM. Again BIOS and change that. Wont hurt a thing it is what the RAM was designed to do.
A straight bump of 0.5ghz is usually not a great idea. it is tedious and time consuming but you should go 100mhz at a time until something fails, by which I mean the system is unstable. After that you probably need to bump the voltage slightly and then go back to the over clocking 100mhz at a time. Just incase, you probably knew this already though.
Other than that all seems to be in order to carry on.