completely new at this, and almost no idea what im doing

[robertltf]

so i have an AMD athlon 64 x2 5200 (2.6ghz) and an asus m2n-e mobo with 6 gb of ram, whats the most stable OC settings i can apply and keep without worrying about my computer overheating or causing major issues, i ask because some of the games i play are a bit cpu intensive, and i don't have the money for a new cpu right now, i would like to be able to get it to 2.8-3.0 ghz, but im afraid to try without somebody who actually knows what they are doing giving me some input on the matter

 

[neon neophyte]

depends what heatsink you are using. what are your current temperatures under full load?

 

[robertltf]

not sure what heatsink i have, or how to check really... i was usuing a crapy laptop for gaming for the past 5 years, im newat this... but i can run prime 95 and real temp to check the full load temp

 

[neon neophyte]

go for it. report results.

 

[robertltf]

will do, i heard to run prime 95 for a few hours, is that right?

 

[neon neophyte]

not really required. your cpu will heat up pretty fast and prime runs hotter than anything else. just run it until the temperature stabilizes.

 

[robertltf]

kk, will do

 

[robertltf]

something just occured to me... does it matter if i have amd cool and quiet on?

 

[neon neophyte]

i dont know much about it

 

[robertltf]

ah ok, it lowers the multiplier and voltage to save power,supposed to make it really unstable during overclock

 

[neon neophyte]

oh, that shouldnt be an issue right now. should clock your processor up and stay there under stress.

 

[robertltf]

ya, prime95 is just started test 4, its still hovering around 56-62, max temp for both cores is 62 right now

 

[neon neophyte]

im not seeing much wiggle room for overclocking

 

[robertltf]

ya, doesn't seem so... the specs for the cpu say max temp 62 celcius, so that really doesn't leave a lot to work with...

 

[neon neophyte]

to be fair, nothing heats a cpu like prime. there is a chance you could get away with a slight overclock and still have safe temps during normal operation.

 

[robertltf]

maybe, but i use dolphin emulator a lot,which is a gamecube/wii emu, normaly i use OpenCL texture decoding which offloads more of the heavy texture processing to my gpu rather than the cpu, and since im using a gtx 660 that would be the prefered option, but in the lastest build, openCL causes crashes at startup, and using the older builds still relies heavily on CPU processing even with openCL on, suppose the only thing i can really do at this point is look for a quad core that will fit my mobo that won't cost me an arm and a leg. thx for all the help, gald i came here rather than making a foolish mistake

 

[neon neophyte]

run that and check your temps ;p

 

[robertltf]

which dolphin?