Old Skool OC Question

[DairyCreamer]

Ok, not that Old Skool...

As I'm prepping to build my wife's new rig over the next month or so, I'd like to OC her old rig to make her experience a little more tolerable in the short term. I don't want to spend $$$ considering she's getting a new system very soon, but wouldn't mind helping a little in the meantime.

She's got, among other things:

MOB: ASUS P5Q SE/R LGA 775 Intel P45
CPU: Intel E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz (Stock Cooling)
RAM: Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
GPU: XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512MB

Is there any amount of OCing I can do on this with stock air to help improve her experience at all?

Thanks!

[MadManOriginal]

Heh, not really *that* old skool. You could probably get some decent oc'ing with a simple FSB bump, the stock FSB for that CPU is 100MHz (or 800MHz depending upon how you want to count it) so a simple bump in FSB will gain some CPU speed. If you don't go crazy you ought to be able to do nothing more than the FSB increase, say to 133MHz (1066MHz) for a cool ~3.3GHz...maybe a little less depending upon the CPU and memory abilities. If you don't change the CPU voltage the stock cooling ought to be fine, just run some stability testing and monitor the temps.

[Meadows]

Those processors should feel comfy at 3 GHz, even the worst ones. Does your wife game at all? If the answer is no, a CPU bump is all you'll "need", and I'm undecided on that need too.

[Crayon Shin Chan]

If it feels too slow at 2.5GHz, the problem is definitely not going to be fixed by running it at 3GHz. Which means it's not the CPU's problem.

[grantmeaname]

Back everything up and reinstall Windows... Winrot may be responsible for the slowness. Alternately, download Autoruns and kill every quickstarter and helper you can get your hands on (except those for programs that she opens every time the computer is on).

[MadManOriginal]

True, if it's on XP then 'winrot' might be an issue, I never really felt that occurs so much with Vista or Win 7 installs though (Vista is just generally slower but that computer ought to run it fine.) A good cleaning might be in order though if she has a bunch of unnecessary crap running in the background. Is it slower or just slow...if the former then some cleanup might help. Run AV scans or whatever to make sure there's nothing stupid bogging down the system.

What exactly does she do that makes it seem slow, or is it just a matter of wanting to make it faster?

[DairyCreamer]

She is a gamer, which is the biggest reason for making a new build. When I built the thing originally, she was just dabbling, but I made a monster.

Vista is fairly recently re-installed, and she doesn't keep too much extra crap on her box.

There's just some times in games where things get bogged down a bit... her graphics settings are moderate, and I feel like she's mostly CPU limited.

I'll try and bump the FSB a bit. My biggest concern with that was just wanting to make sure the RAM would hold up ok since it's only DDR2 800.

Really think that chip will do 3.3 GHz on stock air ok? I don't want to fry her machine before the new one gets built Maybe 120 MHz for 3.0 GHz straight up.

[Crayon Shin Chan]

She is a gamer, which is the biggest reason for making a new build. When I built the thing originally, she was just dabbling, but I made a monster.

You meant "you made her a monster (gamer)" right?

[BloodSoul]

I've only OC'ed on newer systems, but if it is the same you can always up the FSB and then lower the RAM's ratio so that you can reach a higher CPU clock without maxing the ram.

3.3Ghz won't "fry" that machine, worst case scenario it won't boot or it'll blue screen a bit and you will have to go back into bios and lower the OC.

Best of luck

[Meadows]

You want a 10% bump on the videocard at least, always stable on nVidia.