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Although i've had it for quite a long time, along with a proper cooler and MB, I was too afraid to OC it due to lack of knowledge and my crappy 450W Delux PSU. But now I bought a new Seasonic and I decided that it would be a great time to start OC-ing since I plan to buy a 470 soon. What do you think of these results? Should I push a little harder on the vcore?

Click for screenshot

Configuration:
MB: MSI p35-neo2 FR
Cooler: Scythe Kama Angle
RAM: Corsair XMS2 6400C5
PSU: S12-520W
I will be back with some of the BIOS voltages, since I am not sure of my decisions.

Also, i need to know which temperature software to trust. Right now, they indicate the same temps, but at 60 degrees they all have an offset of about 5 degrees, with Real Temp indicating the lowest one.

Once upon a time I did a lot of digging to figure out what temperature reading program was the most accurate. They're all reading the exact same data (distance from TjMax from the on-die CPU sensors) but since Intel never published what TjMax actually was for most/all chips, they all use their own figures for converting that to absolute temperatures. The author of RealTemp put a lot of work into calibrating it, plus it's lightweight and has some nifty logging abilities. Make sure you grab the latest version from the forum there and not from the download link.

And 40 degrees is barely breaking a sweat. 60 degrees would be a good starting target I think, though take into account the lower ambient temperatures this time of year (or not, if you have a well-insulated abode ). If you don't, then an overclock pushed to the limit now will be unstable in 6-8 months.

Honestly you should see 4.0Ghz easily. Most of the googleing I did before I bought mine showed 4.0 as average with many even hitting 4.2 to 4.6

I was able to get mine running stable at 4.4 on air with a mid range gigabyte mobo.

I'm back and it seems I have hit a wall of some sorts. I can't get past 3.9ghz, no matter the voltage settings.

Here is the BIOS Cell Menu, as MSI likes to call it. Can anyone please explain me what those settings do exactly? I've figured out that the CPU Voltage is the Vcore, and Memory Voltage is pretty self-explanatory, but I don't really know about the rest. Also, the MB manual is no more useful than a piece of white paper.

Click me

If you look at your DDR memory frequency, your running it at 868...and that is pretty high for a memory OC, your memory may have issues with running that high. Try setting your FSB/memory ratio on the line above to get your memory down to a lower speed so you can keep raising your FSB.

It doesn't allow me to set it to any value lower than 1:1. I think it's a MB limitation

Did you try lowering the timings on your ram then?

Gonna try right now.

I had a really early E8400 that wouldn't go to 4GHz without quite a lot of extra voltage. With most processors, the last 5% of the overclocking headroom might be stable with a lot of extra voltage, but you'll probably shorten the life of the CPU and at the very least you'll have a hotter PC with much more fan noise.

If you dial it back to the point where it last POSTed before extra voltage was needed, and tweak with just a tiny bit more juice - say 5-10%, you'll likely have a stable everyday overclock that gives you 90% of the performance for only 50% of the noise and heat.

For me that was a cool and quiet 3.8 GHz instead of a hot and noisy 4.1. As always - overclocking is a crapshoot. Just because some people boast of near 5GHz on air, doesn't mean that your chip can too. Take your free performance and be happy with it

Looking at your ram it is rated for 1.8V, now you've got it set for 2.1V. Normally I would suggest pumping a bit more voltage to the ram to see if it can handle the tighter timings while still at those clock settings. Most DDR2 ram I worked with back in the day was able to handle 2.2V, but I would first try lose timings to see if that works out for you.
BTW, what BIOS revision are you running?

It could be the P35 chipset or the mobo itself, as well. We're talking about an FSB of 445 (1780MHz quad data rate) to get the chip to 4GHz (x9 multiplier). There wasn't anything that went over a 333MHz bus officially (1333 if you quad it up) so you might be hitting a wall on the board as well as the chip or the RAM.

That is possible. Though most (non bargain bin) mobos on the P35 chipset I've used have been able to get 450+ without much trouble. I've seen some breach the 500 mark. It is very possible that the FSB that board can handle isn't as high as some others out there. Could always test this by lowering the multiplier and upping the FSB til she crashes.

I'm back, the DRAM timings were indeed the main problem. Got them to 6-6-6-20 and the computer booted fine even at 4.2ghz. Gonna tweak them this evening to see how I can achieve a balance between timings/frequency/temps. Also, it seems I have mistaken the model of my RAM modules. I have the DHX version of the XMS; the ones with big radiators on them.( Click for amazon link of the 2GB version) Don't know if this changes anything, but I thought I should mention this.

LE: The main reason why I need this OC is because I found a GTX470 at a very good price and I don't have the money to upgrade everything at once(gonna buy a proper full-hd monitor too). Is it going to be severely bottlenecked by my CPU, even with this OC?

Congrats on the OC. That's huge. I think you'll find that, for the most part, you're going to find a 1920x1080 monitor (assuming that's what you mean by "full HD") is the bottleneck; the GTX470 has more in it than that.

Thanks. It seems I can't get it to run any higher than 4.3ghz on 1.3v w/o getting prime95 errors. BTW, should I use Small FFTs, Large in-place FFTs or Blend?

Blend is what I use because it claims to be the biggest stress.

If you are testing to make sure you don't have CPU errors, or heat problems, small ffts will bring up cpu errors faster, and it will make the CPU run hotter in general. Blend is good to run for overall stability though. Since memory stability is a concern I would run some memory stress software like memtest as well.

Whenever I do stability testing ( and I admit I go overboard ) I go: P95 ( small FFT ), P95 ( Blend ), memtest, RTHDRIBL, P95 ( Blend ) + RTHDRIBL simultanious to really put the max stress on my system.