Its been some time since i got my hands dirty inside the box and since i have nothing new to instert in it i decided to mess around with the existing components and overclock them. This is the journey i went through.

First of all the system before overclocking:
1.CPU - C2D E8200 @ 2,66
2.GPU - ASUS 8800GTS 512, 650core & 972memory.
3.RAM - 2GB Kingston 800 CL5
4.Resolution - 1400x1050 4:3.
5.Mainboard - MSI P7N SLI Platinum

Eventhough i didnt do anything with the RAM, playing around with the FSB still changes the RAM speed. I will post a picture of it later. Eventhough the board is SLI, getting a second used 8800GTS 512 here is quite difficult because they are very rare. There wasnt any real need for overclocking either, it was more of a need to learn how exactly to do it and what are the dangers etc.

So i started with a CPU. I did some reading on the net about overclocking in general and then specifically on the 8200. There wasn't any good articles or posts about the e8200 but i did find one on the E6750 which is the "predecessor" of the E8200 (both have 8x multiplier and FSB333). What i wanted was a nice 500mhz overclock but that didnt happen without messing around with the voltages and i didnt want to mess with those. I did reach a clock speed of 3,12 at FSB 390 but since 400 started a reboot loop i pulled back to a safe fsb of 375 which means the clock speed was now 3,0ghz.

Overclocking the cpu wasnt that hard really, rather the problems came elsewhere. For instance i had to upgrade the bios on my mobo because the Cpu Z didnt display the correct speed in windows. But to upgrade the bios with MSI tools i need MSI live update and that program required me to update to version 4.0 which kept crashing endlessly. So eventually i managed to bypass that with an older version and flash the bios to 1.3 successfully and i could now see the correct speed in CPU Z.

I havent done anything with the ram untill i find out more about the sticks i have. I dont want to accidentally kill them even i am doing very mild overclocking which is more like a reduction of safe zone rather than overclocking.

The GPU overclock went smoothly as well. Unfortunately the tools caused some major annoyance. I figured i should start with Asus tools as its an Asus card. But since the asus tools failed to start at all because of some weird stuff with EIO.dll i uninstalled all Asus tools and downloaded nTune and EVGA Precision and after using both I opted for the EVGA tool. So again i did some research on the overclocks of the 8800GTS and started playing around with the tools. The first thing i did was to see how much noise i would be willing to tolerate so i raised the fan speed untill it got annoying which was at 59% so i scaled back to 55% (default was at 37%). So this was the first barrier I set because I wanted more performance but not at the cost of a lumbermill below my desk. So the default speeds were 650mhz on the core and 972 on the memory. I managed to raise the core speed to 806 and memory 1060 all the while during playtesting no artifacts and the temperature remaining at 60C-61C degrees. The stock Asus cooler is quite ok actually because for the other overclockers their cards were hotter by default.

To see the difference that i had caused i used two benchmarks: X3Terran Conflict Rolling Demo and Stalker Call of Pripyat Benchmark. Both are freely available and weigh in about 500mb download.

So the system after OC:

1.CPU - C2D E8200 @ 3,00
2.GPU - ASUS 8800GTS 512, 806core & 1060memory.
3.RAM - 2GB Kingston 800 CL5
4.Resolution - 1400x1050 4:3.
5.Mainboard - MSI P7N SLI Platinum

Stay tuned for the results. Since im getting hungry im going to stop here for now and go grab something to eat.

Cool, good job. I haven't played around with overclocking in many, many years. I'm interested in seeing the differences the OC made.

And here are the results in a graph form (check the pictures below) Both of these games didnt really care about the CPU that much but reacted very well to the GPU overclock. The thing is that the Call of Pripyat scores have little to do with the actual game because it is not possible to fly around on the map and thus it is impossible to recreate such situation in the game. The X3 tests however can be recreated in the game since it is space and you can fly wherever you want to but there are some inconsistencies as you can see in the results that one scene performed better with stock GPU clock and oc CPU than when both were overclocked.

I did manage to bring my PC to a full stop though when i messed around with RAM timings. I had to reset the bios to bring it back to life.

EDIT i put all on one picture

And heres the picture from Bios. I have changed the FSB (nr 1. on the picture) and the RAM speed has gone down (nr 2. on the picture). Im not sure if the lower ram speed had much of a effect on the CPU benchmark but at 3ghz the ram speed was back at 800.

I had to bring down the GPU overclock. When i checked for the temps i used Divinity 2 and some other games to see how the temperature changes but apparently none of those pushed the graphics hard enough. So later in divinity 2 when i entered the area of the flying fortresses the temperature went up to 72C which caused problems. So i now run the card at 741mhz Core and 999mhz Memory. The temperature is now stable at 63-65C and no problems at 59% fan speed.