Life after Overclocking

If you think you can sleep well now that you’ve overclocked your CPU, you are mistaken. High CPU frequency is just a means to get a higher performance from your whole system and you have to do more to reach that goal. The CPU means a lot, but the memory timings almost always affect performance whereas performance in games is often determined by the graphics card.

You decreased the memory frequency when you were preparing to overclock the CPU. Now you should raise it back if possible. The general rule is the higher the frequency, the higher the memory performance is. So, you should leave the memory timings unchanged (you have lifted them up previously) but try to achieve the maximum possible memory frequency. It usually helps to increase the voltage, but not too high. It is undesirable to increase the voltage of DDR2 memory higher than 2.1-2.3V. Found the maximum frequency? Good. Now you should find the minimum possible timings for it. As opposed to the frequency, it’s better to have lower timings.

I give you general recommendations, so don’t be afraid to check them out in practice. You may find yourself forced to select an inconvenient divisor or increase the timings too much to get a high memory frequency. Perhaps it will be better, for the overall system performance, to reduce the memory frequency a little, but set lower timings. Run a few tests for different frequency/timings combinations and choose the best one.

Performance in games is largely determined by your graphics card. If you are a dedicated gamer, don’t forget to overclock your graphics card as well. Overclocking graphics cards is an extensive subject that calls for a separate article. It’s not enough anymore to increase the GPU and graphics memory frequencies to get the maximum possible performance. Today, you have to account for the graphics core having multiple subunits clocked at different frequencies. You have to watch for image freezes. You should reflash the graphics card’s BIOS to correct the timings and frequencies.

Now that your system is overclocked and, hopefully, delivers considerably higher performance, you can sleep well. I mean if you can suppress the desire to tell everyone of your success and check out the increased performance of your PC in real-life applications.

Good overclocking luck to you!