I just bought this processor from newegg and I am planning to OC to around 2.8Ghz from the stock 2.2Ghz. I don't know how to OC very well cause I don't understand how it works with the RAM. I don't understand how the ratios work. And yes, I understand what ratios are, I just don't understand what Mhz to set my RAM too. I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium and OCZ PC3200 2x1Gb Platinum with Heat spreaders @ 400Mhz 2-3-3-5; 1T. How would I best overclock this? I tried reading the guide on OC amd64 on tomshardware forums, but found it to make me only more confused. He didn't start from the ground up and he didn't explain much having to do with the RAM. If there are any good guides you know of, please post the links. I tried googling it, but I didn't come up with much. Thanks.
Oh and by the way, I plan on buying an ATi Radeon HD2950 pro/xt for this, so OCing is really important.

hey, if you PM me i can send you an excel sheet which i created for my OC, it has the FSB speed from 200 - 350 Mhz, and it will give you all the different speeds thigs will be at when you set everything, it tells you everything you need to know except voltage. So your HTT from 3x to 5x ram from 200Mhz (1:1) to 100Mhz(1:2) it should help you some.

But what you could do is, find the maximums of all the different pieces, so turn the HTT ratio down to 3x, CPU multi down to like 5x or something and ram to 100Mhz(1:2) then increase your FSB and raise it till it isnt stable. Then put it back down to normal, and set your CPU multi to like 11 or whatever it is normally at, and raise the FSB till the CPU isnt stable.

Set the CPU multi back to 5 or whatever and set the ram to 200 or (1:1) and see how high the ram can go.

THen when you are all done with that try and run everything at the highest setting, but keep the HTT around 1000Mhz a little higher is ok and a little lower is alright too. dont increase CPU voltage on that CPU over 1.5 volts unless you have good cooling. my Opteron 165 is at 3 Ghz and 1.35 volts.

you have pretty good memory which can handle around a 25MHz overclock

if you want to hit 2.8GHz on that 4200+ you will need to do this

in the bios, lower the memory speeds from DDR 400 to DDR 333

then increase the FSB to around 260-270MHz

PS this will require increasing the voltage, (and try to keep the HTT under 1100 MHz)

you may need to increase the timings of the memory to 2.5-3-3-5 (don't worry, you will still get far better memory performance than with a lower timing and stock speeds)

even though a voltage increase will be needed, i recommend you try the stock, then do a prime 95 test for about a hour, if it fails the test, lower the memory to DDR 266 (this will bring the memory below it's stock speeds, this will be temporary) then test prime95 again for a hour, if it fails then bring the memory back to ddr 333 then increase the voltage by a small amount

(you generally want to keep the voltage as low as possible while still remaining stable as any increase in voltage will cause a increase in cpu temperature )

PS the amd x2's don't overclock as well as the opterons but the x2's have a faster memory controller

Got it too 2.869Ghz but I got one error on prime95. It says, "Fatal Error: rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4. Please see stress.txt for details." I can't find stress.txt. Does anyone know whether that is because I got my CPU clocked too high or if maybe it was a software problem? It kept on running the test after the error happened. It was the only error I got. Any ideas? Also my temps maxed at about 58 degrees C. Is this too hot? Thanks!

Is there a guide to OC 939socket Athlons?

Cheers

yep

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] erclocking

but it wont tell you how to do it exactly for the 4200+

I recommend keeping the memory clocks down then when the cpu becomes unstable then you can be sure it has nothing to do with the memory, then after that, begin to increase the voltage by smallamounts (don't go too high or it will cause damage or it will overheat

58c is not too bad just try to stay under 65C

It does just fine in memtest...when I run memtest I get zero errors. I only ran it for thirty minutes though, so I will try lowering ram to 266 just to see what happens. Oh, and when I upped the voltage some, the error happened again; only in less time than before. Should I put the voltage on auto and then run CPU-Z while stressing with prime to get a ballpark idea of how many volts I should have it around? I got it at 1.4 volts and I don't want to hit any higher than that really, so I might just have to back the multiplier down to 10.5. Any thoughts? Thanks for all your help so far guys! Props to you razor512 for the mini OCing guide.

I just got a 4200+ from newegg also.

I just did a quick check on the type of ram chip that OCZ uses and its the same one i have infineon BE-5 (i have mushkin HP PC3200 2x1gig). Either way, these chips don't like high voltage soo 2.6-2.8 is good, although some people got them stable at 2.9v and higher. heres a link with ram database info:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] hp?t=67762

As far as OCing the toledo (I hope you have a toledo, check with CPU Z to make sure) I got mine stable at 2.9g @2.4V, however I have a crappy zalman cooler that can't keep temperature down. I'll be replacing it with a thermalright ultima 90. I am pretty sure it'll go higher. If you have a manchester I can't attest to how well that will OC (although from the reviews I have read, not as well as the toledoes). Toms hardware actually has an old article on OCing the 4200 toledo, so you can google that up.

As far as my ram, I was able to get it stable to ddr480 with like 2.5-3-3-8 1T @ 2.7 v (although i can change the voltage with no loss in stability). Unfortunately i can't get it higher than that without resorting to 2T (making it worthless to go any higher). So right now Im running 2.6ghz with the ram 1:1 (ddr 480). I was able to do some benchmarks with the chip running at 2.9ghz and the ram set to 333mhz and got some improvements with 3dmark 05 (im just using it to see general performance increase, not as a definitive tool). Once I get my cooler I'll see if i can go higher than 2.9ghz (now that i Know my ram goes up to ddr480). Overall I was hoping to run ddr500 and 2.75ghz for a mild OC overall (if you look at those links those guys went over ddr500 with our chip), but you can't get everything for cheap now can you? (well if I would have gone to AM2 but thats another story)

Hope this gives you some ideas with what you can do. I also have the same version of mobo... well i have the SE version reflashed with your bios