Hi. I'm building a new PC and putting an Intel i7 2600K in it, and a lot of people have been telling me to overclock it.

What exactly does that mean?

Is it hard? Dangerous (not literally, but you get what I mean)?

All info is greatly appreciated.

Overclocking is taking the default speed of the CPU and increasing it. On most motherboards its very easy to, just go into BIOS and change the CPU multiplier or CPU frequency. It can get you quite a bit of performance, however in order to achieve higher overclocks you have to mess with voltage settings. You should research how much your CPU can handle or you could fry the chip. I got an extra 800Mhz out of my CPU by overclocking it on air cooling. http://i438.photobucket.com/albums/qq102/Starforce9/c2feb1df.jpg Your CPU has been known to hit as high as 5Ghz on air cooling.

Thanks for the answer. Now, by air cooling, do you just just mean buying a good CPU cooler, because that's what I'm doing.

Sorry, obvious newbie.

Air cooling is any heatsink and fan that doesnt use liquid cooling (or one of the other less common types of cooling). Air cooling could mean the stock cooler or an aftermarket heatsink/fan. (But if overclocking you dont want to stick with stock coolers)

Here is my motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157229

Alright, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118054&Tpk=zalman%20cnps9900%20NT%20120mm is my cooler.

Would that be good enough?

Board and cooler are both good. 99% of the 2500K/2600K will hit 4.5 GHz with ease. Past that the margins get smaller, but it really depends on the chip. Not all chips OC the same....one 2600K may OC better than another one. My 2500K is doing 4.6GHz right now at 1.34V at vcore....I can do more, but I just get uncomfortable with going higher on the vcore.

There are a few overclocking guides out there, but mainly for Asus and Gigabyte boards. I'm not sure how the UEFI bios interface is on the AsRock board, but this guide might lead you in the right direction as a lot of the features tend to be the same:

http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/overclocking/39184-p67-sandy-bridge-overclocking-guide-beginners.html


If it's too different, a simple google of your board and overclocking should turn up some helpful results too.

That CPU is a beast even at stock clocks.

It takes practice to overclock and requires knowing some basics. Overclocking involves first bumping up the CPU frequency in small steps. Adding voltage improves stability as long as the CPU does not overheat, because more voltage means more heat, so does frequency. Talking about the individual CPU you are overclocking of course. Generally frequency is not comparable between different CPU's. Different individual CPU's can also be more or less overclockable as already mentioned. No single CPU is perfectly identical with another if you zoom in close enough to the nanometric scale.

If you are raising just the CPU bus, without touching the multipliers, it can affect other bus frequencies, like the memory bus. Your RAM has limits, and they can be reached this way. You can either lower the memory bus multiplier, or increase the CPU multiplier (in your case with the unlocked K model), so that the max memory frequency for the RAM is not reached. There are more details to memory settings, but CAS latency is related to the max memory frequency. Lower latency is good, but higher latencies allow you to reach higher frequencies. Low latency combined with high frequency means expensive RAM.

Overclocking the graphics card is a different thing, but at least reference boards (more or less standard, original reference build) can be overclocked and there are tools for that. Again, small steps, and do stability tests to see is it still safe over long periods. You would start getting geometry error, or pixel error in case the GPU or video card RAM was overheating. You can gain a lot from also overclocking the graphics card. The latest nVidia cards weren't doing so well in overclockability the last time I checked.

Both CPU's and GPU's have some safety guards against overheating. They can shutdown the whole system, lower frequencies on their own, or cut video signal to the monitor to name a few. My old graphics card recovered from an overclocking failure after letting it sit for a minute or two, but the previous card to that, didn't and it was not able to send a signal any longer. This was years ago though. Yes it's possible to damage components by overclocking, or at least shorten their life span. Small steps.

Just curious: What is "small" in terms of:
-cpu frequency?
-bus multiplier?
-voltage?