The most common overclocking trick is to increase the CPU and memory voltages in order to enable the component to achieve a higher clock rate. To do that, you need to know first the current voltage of your CPU and memory. You can check this at the motherboard setup, under Hardware Monitoring, or thru a program like CPU-Z.

The problem is that if you increase the component voltage too much, you may burn it (even though this never happened to us, it has already happened to several acquaintances of ours). We suggest you to increase 0.1 V on memory and on CPU voltages to see if you can raise the CPU base clock. If you are brave enough, you may want to increase voltage even more.

On the setup screens we’ve shown, CPU voltage was called “CPU Voltage” or “CPU Vcore Voltage”, while memory voltage was called “DIMM Voltage” or “DDR2 Voltage Control”. As you can see, even though the name of the option changes from motherboard to motherboard, it is very easy to recognize it.

The idea is quite simple: increase the voltage, increase the CPU base clock, load Windows and run stability test. Keep doing this until you find the highest clock rate you case use with stability on your system.

After finding the maximum base clock you can get by increasing both CPU and memory voltages, we recommend you to reduce the voltage from the component that didn’t improve by an increase on its voltage.

For example, if you find that increasing the memory voltage from 2.2 V to 2.3 V improved overclocking but increasing again to 2.4 V didn’t, go back and leave it at 2.3 V. The same idea goes for the CPU. This way you reduce the risk of burning or overheating your components.

Talking about overheating, you need to monitor your CPU temperature. It should be below 70º C. If it is above 65º C you should consider replacing your CPU cooler by a high-end one. Click here to learn how to monitor your CPU temperature.

Another overclocking technique available is to lower the CPU multiplier. As we mentioned earlier, all CPUs nowadays (except Athlon 64 FX on AMD line) don’t allow you to increase its clock multiplier, however Athlon 64 CPUs allow you to reduce it. So you may be able to achieve a better overclocking by lowering the CPU multiplier (if your motherboard has this option) and increasing the CPU base clock. Usually you will be able to achieve a higher base clock by doing this.

Don’t be fooled by lower clock rates. By lowering the CPU multiplier, your CPU internal clock may be lower than the maximum clock achieved using its standard multiplier, but you may in fact achieve a higher performance due to the increase on its base clock. So, you need to run a performance test at these two scenarios to see which one does provide a higher performance for your system – your CPU with its standard multiplier increasing its base clock to the maximum or your CPU with a lower multiplier and increasing its base clock even more. We usually run PCMark05 and Quake 4 to check this.

Some motherboards provide CPU multiplier in 1x steps, some others in 0.5x steps. You should decrease a position (1x or 0.5x), find the maximum base clock possible, run a performance test and start all over again, decreasing the multiplier one more position. And again, and again, until you have run all multiplier options. Don’t be shy, sometimes we can achieve a fine overclocking at a low multiplier we’ve never though about before. With the performance data at hands you can say exactly what overclocking configuration gives your system the best performance.

On Athlon 64 FX systems you have a third option, which is increasing the CPU clock multiplier, as it is unlocked. Of course you can combine it with increasing the CPU base clock. Once again you will need to run a benchmarking program to see which overclocking configuration will provide the higher performance to your system.