HANDS ON GUIDE

Step 2: Working out what's wrong

Just because the PC froze, that's no reason to give up. We have a whole bagful of tricks to try in the BIOS. Generally speaking, there are five main reasons why an overclock doesn't work:

1. Too much heat

2. The RAM can't keep up

3. Not enough voltage (or too much voltage)

4. The CPU and/or motherboard can't take it

5. Various assorted gremlins

Investigating the potential causes in this order is generally a wise move. Heat is the number one problem created by overclocking, since overclocking a CPU not only makes it faster, but also causes it to consume more energy. This is especially the case when you increase voltages; as the system becomes faster and more power-hungry, the amount of heat produced increases.

However, at stock voltages, heat isn't generally a problem, and this was especially the case with my system, as I used the excellent Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro to cool my CPU. It's best to check, though, and the BIOS makes it easy to do this, since it has access to a range of temperature probes. Inside the POWER section, there's a HARDWARE MONITOR submenu. This shows the readouts from the on-board temperature probes, as well as the speed of any fans directly connected to the motherboard (as opposed to via Molex plugs). My Q6600 was idling at just over 30˚C. This might be the temperature at which the average British tourist turns the colour of a particularly tender lobster, but for a Core 2, it's positively parky.

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