Overclocking Guide

One of the reasons to water cool a system is to allow you to overclock your CPU to run faster (which causes the extra heat). Here are some step-by-step guides to overclocking depending on your motherboad/cpu combo.

Important Warning – Overclocking carries a risk of damage and may invalidate your warrant. We take no respnsiblity for any loss or damage as a result of attempting to overclock or water cool your computer.

Guide to overclocking Intel Core i7 Processors

Guide to overclocking Intel Core 2 Duo Processors

Basic Terminology Used
The guides may refer to thing’s like Multiplier, FSB etc. If you’re not famiular with them take a look below or checkout wiki for a more detailed explanation.

Multiplier
In computing, the clock multiplier (or CPU multiplier or bus/core ratio) measures the ratio of an internal CPU clock rate to the externally supplied clock. A CPU with a 10x multiplier will thus see 10 internal cycles (produced by PLL-based frequency multiplier circuitry) for every external clock cycle. For example, a system with an external clock of 133 MHz and a 10x clock multiplier will have an internal CPU clock of 1.33 GHz. The external address and data buses of the CPU (often collectively termed front side bus or FSB in PC contexts) also use the external clock as a fundamental timing base, however, they could also employ a (small) multiple of this base frequency (typically two or four) in order to transfer data faster. More information is avalible on wikipedia.

FSB (Front Side Bus)
The FSB is the bus that carries data between the CPU and the northbridge. The bandwidth or maximum theoretical throughput of the front-side bus is determined by the product of the width of its data path, its clock frequency (cycles per second) and the number of data transfers it performs per clock cycle. For example, a 64-bit (8-byte) wide FSB operating at a frequency of 100 MHz that performs 4 transfers per cycle has a bandwidth of 3200 megabytes per second (MB/s).

The number of transfers per clock cycle is dependent on the technology used. For example, GTL+ performs 1 transfer/cycle, EV6 2 transfers/cycle, and AGTL+ 4 transfers/cycle. Intel calls the technique of four transfers per cycle Quad Pumping.

Many manufacturers publish the speed of the FSB in MHz, but often do not use the actual physical clock frequency but the theoretical effective data rate (which is commonly called megatransfers per second or MT/s). This is because the actual speed is determined by how many transfers can be performed by each clock cycle as well as by the clock frequency. For example, if a motherboard (or processor) has a FSB clocked at 200 MHz and performs 4 transfers per clock cycle, the FSB is rated at 800 MT/s. More information is avalible on wikipedia.

Northbridge
The northbridge, also known as a memory controller hub (MCH) or an integrated memory controller (IMC) in Intel systems (AMD, VIA, SiS and others usually use ‘northbridge’), is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on a PC motherboard, the other being the southbridge. More information is avalible on wikipedia.

Southbridge
The southbridge, also known as an I/O Controller Hub (ICH) in Intel systems (AMD, VIA, SiS and others usually use ’southbridge’), is a chip that implements the "slower" capabilities of the motherboard in a northbridge/southbridge chipset computer architecture. More information is avalible on wikipedia.

BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)
The BIOS is boot firmware, designed to be the first code run by a PC when powered on. The initial function of the BIOS is to identify, test, and initialize system devices such as the video display card, hard disk, floppy disk and other hardware. The BIOS sets the machine hardware into a known state, so that software stored on compatible media can be loaded, executed, and given control of the PC.[3] This process is known as booting, or booting up, which is short for bootstrapping. More information is avalible on wikipedia.