I have be pushing my processor up slowly to about 2.7 and just wanna know when I should stop.

My temp idle is 38°C and 45°C when maxed
I am not sure what I should over clock it too.

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Asus A8N-SLI nForce4 SLI
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.2
Sapphire Radeon X1600XT 256MB PCI-E
Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 Heatsink (works great)
seagate 320GB HDD sata2
Western Digital 250GB sata2
Western Digital 120GB sata
OCZ 1GB (2x512MB) PC-3200 DDR400 Dual Channel
OCZ PowerStream 520W SLI
plus 6 fans to move air around good quality fans
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What you need to do is stress your pc and test for instabilities!!!!

Once you have found that point, back off the overclocking untill its stable again!!!!

But [COLOR="Red"][B]ALWAYS[/B][/COLOR] keep one eye on those temps!!!!

use PRIME to test stability

http://sp2004.fre3.com/sp2004exe_20060405.cab for 3 hours (stress the cpu)
with a priority of 1


Also use Super PI http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip and run a 32m run

if it can pass both your fine.

IMO SysTool from http://techpowerup.com also works great for testing stability.

You'll know you've gone to far when u hear a pop or poof sound and see smoke.... no seriously follow the previous suggestions these guys are Smaat!

lol ya i guess thats true. I don't really care about running this pc into the ground cause i can always go out and buy two more of them easy. I am going to grab a new system soon anyway. and a stable laptop just in case.

Hi Roamex,

each individual CPU is different in terms of how far it can be pushed. what is considered "too much" is whatever you're comfortable with. since you said you don't care if you ruin it, then there really is no such thing as "too much".

as far as temps are concerned... the max operating temp for an Athlon64 is 65°C. chances are if your motherboard allows you too overclock, then it also has shutdown and warning temp settings (which will prevent your CPU from overheating).

what you don't want to go crazy with is voltage. too much voltage is how you fry a CPU. generally anything below 1.5v is considered safe, but each CPU will have it's own tolerance level. remember don't raise the voltage first, raise it only after you have reached your max overclock at the previous voltage setting. if raising the voltage doesn't stabilize it then you know that you've hit your CPU's ceiling.

cheers, and happy overclocking

FWIW, AMD processors don't really like temps above 55C