What's Holding It Back?

[wolf18]

Hi all. I have a system that is about a year and a half old and I am trying to see if I can OC it higher. I don't know whether I got a bad E6600 or if my ASUS P5NSLI or NZXT 500 watt PSU is holding it back. I have an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 and the temps are around 40-43 degrees C. Right now the system is running at around 2.71 GHz and the CPUz says the RAM is running at ~400 MHz, but in the BIOS it says it is running slightly faster than 800 MHz.

I have lowered the RAM speeds and OCed the CPU to around 3 GHz, but whenever I try to bring the RAM back up to speed it doesn't work. I am still new with overclocking so I hoping that it is my technique that is holding me back instead of my hardware holding me back. All help is much appreciated.

 

[Evilonigiri]

The first step is to fully understand the OCing guide here. If that doesn't solve your problem, ask for help.

As for the CPUz showing the ram speed ~400MHz, you'll have to multiply the number by 2, which should match the number in the bios.