newbie OC - e6400 w/ Asus AI Tuning

[regeisle]

I've been happy w/ my e6400 rig for 3 months or so now, but have that "driving a ferrari at 45 mph" feeling. Granted it's not the best c2d out there, but I know I can get more out of it. Here's my situation...

I have a Asus P5B-E with the AI Tuning feature. Since I know very little about OC'ing, I really don't want to mess around too much with voltages, ram frequencies, etc. I know those are the essentials of OC, but what I'm hoping for is just a little boost from the AI Tuning and call it a day sinc Asus is trying to make it easy on me. From what I understand, I can modify the CPU Frequency in the "manual" mode and if everything else is left to auto they will self adjust accordingly? I bumped my CPU Freq from stock 266 to 275 and my speed went to about 2.22 from 2.3 using cpu-z to measure. Blazing, I know.

How high should I realistically push the CPU Freq in the manual tuning mode, w/o touching anything else? Moderate load at that slight overclcok I was at 45c, which is fine since I'm not planning on having this chip more than 2 years or so. Is it a case of just keep bumping up by 5 units until it gets unstable? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Maye I'm leaving out a 2nd easy bios tweak that would help out - you tell me.

Thanks in advance

Richard

 

[CrazeD]

You nailed it! Up it by 5 at a time until you're happy or it becomes unstable. When it becomes unstable, you have to make it stable again.

A few reasons it can become unstable are voltages, the memory is running too fast, or heat.

I'm not sure what speed your RAM runs at, but if it's a slower DDR2 model then you will have problems with that before anything else. What you'll have to do is just underclock the memory to the next slowest speed.

You should be able to hit around 3.0GHz+ easily.

 

[regeisle]

That's great news, thanks CrazeD. Memory (will update my sig) is DDR800 (Corsair XMS2). Just a general question, and I guess this only applies to my asus mobo. With it so easy through AI Tuning, why would anyone get into the slew of other settings? Is that just for extreme OC'ing, or is it a safer, more stable approach?

 

[CrazeD]

Doing it manually is more stable and more customizable. Plus you get the feeling of accomplishment.

In all honesty though, over clocking manually is just as easy - you just have to get the hang of it.