After locking all possible clocks and enabling overclocking, the next step is increasing the CPU base clock. Almost all motherboards allow you to increase the base clock in 1 MHz steps. Of course if you go one megahertz at a time this task will take forever. So you may try increasing the CPU base clock from 200 MHz to 220 MHz, save all changes, and load Windows. Inside Windows you will need to perform what is called “stability test”, i.e. check if your PC won’t crash while overclocked.

There are several programs you may use. But since we are still in the middle of the overclocking process (we will try to increase the CPU base clock even more), you may want to use a program that won’t take so long to run. Here we run PCMark05 one time and Quake 4 three times (click here to learn how to use Quake 4 for this task) at this point.

If your system was stable enough, restart your PC, enter setup and increase the CPU base clock by 5 MHz, save the changes, load Windows and repeat the stability test.

If Windows doesn’t load or you face stability issues, then you need to decrease the CPU base clock – we recommend doing this 1 MHz at a time – until you find the maximum base clock your CPU will work with without crashing.

If you have a motherboard like the one shown on Figure 3, you will have to stop here, as it doesn’t provide more overclocking options. If this is your case, we recommend you to run a heavier stability test if you want to keep your PC overclocked (PassMark BurnIn Test is an good choice). If your PC fails, you will need to reduce the CPU base clock by 1 MHz until you find a base clock where your PC doesn’t crash during the stability test.

But if your motherboard provides more overclocking options, like voltage configurations or CPU multiplier, you will probably want to play more in order to achieve a higher overclocking.