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Dark Helmet · Guest

Hi all. I've been away from the pc hardcore hardware scene for a few years
and have lost quite a bit of knowledge in the process. So, after just
plopping in a Opty 185 into my socket 939 board to eke a bit more out of my
set-up, I was hoping to get some good advice. Current set-up:

Opty 185
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo
2 gigs (A Data - Tawian kind of generic brand, but with heatsinks)) DDR 400
BFG Tech 8800 GTS 640mb
etc...

Here's my questions:
1. Under the heaviest load, I'm getting 30-33 C temp, which seems to
indicate I may have some headroom to up the clock, but I understand the
temps of these newest processors aren't safe at as high of temps of old.
What's fairly safe for this processor?

2. I installed the stock AMD heatsink, which seemed surprisingly very well
designed, but I "missed" the first few attempts to get the bugger to latch.
Should I be worried that my thermal paste might be uneven?

3. What's just a good general guide on how to do this nowadays, particlarly
for this processor and/or mobo? Now I haven't even looked into my bios yet
so I'm asking a little prematurely, but I believe it's still the old how
high can the ram go along with the processor? If not, are there more
options to tweak the innards of the processor without stressing the other
paths like memory, PCI-E, etc?

4. The Nvidia chip on the mobo, (Nforce 4 I believe - it's next to the PCI
Express slots as my 8800 GTS is sitting right on top of it) has a fan but
gets extremely hot to the touch. Like really hot. Is this going to be a
problem in OC'ing my processor?

Well, thanks in advance for any help on this process. For some reason, I
feel the need to get back into being a pc tweaker again, and I'm looking
forward to it!

Dark Helmet