My secret technique

This morning I have been attempting to get a little more for my money and overclock my CPU and GPU. It didn’t take long as I didn’t want to risk damaging any components so I went for a fair value I thought was safe. Hit the jump to see how I fared.

The components I would be working with were a Sapphire Radeon HD4870, an Intel Q6600 G0 stepping and an Asus P5QL-E Motherboard. All of these components are perfectly suited to overclocking (at least to the level I was aiming for) and I decided to start with my GPU.

After entering the Catalyst control center and I clicked through to the ATI Overdrive panel, I saw a large button labeled ‘Auto Tune’ . The process of this is that it slowly increases the core and then the memory clocks, testing every time. Although this system works, it is painfully slow so I (being an impatient little thing) canceled and went manual. After a blue screen of death from testing my 790 core and 1100 memory setting, and a system crash from 780 and 1050, I finally settled on an overall setting of 770mhz for the core and 1000mhz for the memory, as you can see (along with more details) below.

GPUZ Results

I then moved my crosshairs to my CPU. After looking intothe AI booster that came packaged with my motherboard,  I found that it just didnt have the same functionality that the bios did, so i decided to go there instead. After a fair bit of tinkering, this is what I came up with.

CPUZ Results

Hopefully these combined overclocks will give me an extra couple of FPS in my games and make its a little more zippy at multitasking. Feel free to comment any recommendations or questions

The first episode of the Blue Screen of Death podcast has been released. Take a look over at Sarcastic Gamer to find out more and download.

Make sure you vote for extra life in this poll!! It is a poll to decide who will receive all earnings from Houston’s Twestival (http://houston.twestival.com/). Extra Life (http://extralife.sarcasticgamer.com/) is a charity effort by the Sarcastic Gamer Community to raise money for Texas Children’s Cancer Center (http://www.txccc.org/), where they are working to rid cancer from the world. In short, play games, heal kids.

VOTE HERE!!

Yes, a Sarcastic Gamer PC Community Podcast is in the works, and episode one should be released during the summer holidays. Find out more, after the jump.

After the relative failure of the Overclocked PC podcast, only making one or two episodes, the new podcast will hope to continue to bring the PC love to the Sarcastic Gamer Community. The podcast will include all the latest PC gaming news, what the hosts have been playing and some letters and emails from our huge base of more than thirteen listeners worldwide. (Old red show reference – Sarcastic ed.)

We hope that you enjoy our podcast as much as we will do, and I cant wait to record. Expect more news to be released in the next couple of weeks!

Bubbles Wallpaper

I made a new wallpaper! It is 1280×1024 (that is my screen size), and can be found full size here

[EDIT] I used a photoshop tutorial to make this, but I can no longer find it. If you made the tutorial, Props to you!

Here is a wrap up of of the games I played today.

Project Reality

I had some great fun on the Reality Teamwork Mumble server, with some truly awful singing from Wicca, and a Banana-phone rave with L4gi. Awesome fun

Not much else really… I have been on the interweb and Myface a fair bit, as well as this but I haven’t really played any other games.