overclocking Overclocking Intel CPU: Beginner's Guide

[Turk.]

By Whitson Gordon


Before You Start: Read This First
I wrote this guide from my experience, but I had a lot of help from sites like overclockers.com, overclock.net, and hexus.net, to name a few. The general steps?especially the stress testing ones?should be similar between machines, but this should not be the only overclocking guide you read.
Remember that no two systems will overclock the same?even if they have the exact same hardware. Every unit of every processor is different, and my i7-4770K may not overclock as highly as your i7-4770K, and vice versa, even with all other things held constant.

Why Overclock?
There are any given number of reasons one would want to overclock, but in general, you'll get the most benefit if you're using your computer for more CPU intensive tasks, such as video encoding, 3D rendering, or (sometimes) gaming.

Glossary
While this is not an exhaustive list, these are the settings we'll be tweaking in this guide. The jargon related to your clock speed is as follows:
?The Base Clock affects your CPU frequency, RAM frequency, and other things. We won't be tweaking it in this guide, but we'll be using it to calculate our final clock speed.
?Coupled with the base clock, your CPU multiplier decides your final CPU frequency. It works like this: if your base clock is, say, 100 MHz and your multiplier is 35, your CPU frequency will be 100 MHz x 35 = 3.5 GHz.
?CPU Vcore is the main voltage value we'll be tweaking. As you increase your clock speed, you will likely have to raise your Vcore to supply your processor with enough power.

That's it for today. There are a ton of other settings we could talk about, but this is a "beginner's" guide after all, so we're going to try and keep things as simple as possible.

What You'll Need
?A Windows machine.
?An unlocked, "K" series Intel processor.
?An overclocking-friendly motherboard.
?A good CPU cooler.
?Prime95, LinX, and/or AIDA64.
?Previously mentioned RealTemp.

How to Overclock Your CPU

Step One: Stress Test Your Default Settings
Step Two: Raise Your Multiplier
Step Three: Stress Test Your CPU
Step Four: Increase Your Voltage
Step Five: Rinse and Repeat
Step Six: Perform Some Final Stress Tests

Next Steps

There's plenty more to overclocking, but this guide should be enough to keep any beginner busy for awhile. Remember to do some outside reading; the sites mentioned at the beginning of this article have a ton of information contained within. The more you read, the easier the process is going to be (and the more effective your overclocking will be). Good luck!

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