What's acceptable?

[AMDnoob]

K, i was sick and tired of trying to squeeze out wht i could w/ my aging Dell, so i decided to get a new comp, and the only way to get it right was to build one. I'm not quite up to speed w/ everyhting but i think it's a pretty capable setup. But anyways I've been cautiously eyeing OCing from a distance but I'm, too scared to give it a go. I'm running w/ an AMD Phenom 9950 (2.6Ghz). What I'm really asking is wht would it take to do some small stepping, like baby steps. Idk, maybe get it to 2.8 Ghz and see where things go from there. I've only got the stock cooler w/ me which is heftier than I thought it would be. So would OCing to ~2.8Ghz be too much for the stock cooler? also where is the best place to overclock from? Straight out of the BIOS? or maybe using AMD OverDrive? Does OverDrive go into the BIOS and modify the multipliers and stuff as you change the sliders? also, wht does it mean to be stable? I'm clearly a noob (hence the user name) to this whole scene, but hey you gotta start somewhere, but some clarification would be nice. If you need any other system specs just ask. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H w/ AMD's 790GX chipset.

 

[flyin15sec]

Use AMD Overdrive and just change the CPU mulitplier from 13 to 14. That is 2.8ghz, then run a stress test program to make sure it is ok. You might even be able to just use the built in Overdrive testing program. I personally use Prime95.

When you find that all is good and well. Go into your BIOS and manually change the setting there.