GaryT

my bad, the cooler does have numbers on it, it says ultra sd -9025hs on the fan but that brings up many different things on google images so I'm guessing that's the fan model alone, this is what it looks like, and a picture of it running, the blue fan came out of a "Eagle Voltas" power supply. tiger direct apparently calls it a ultra x-wind, which I'm sure would be written on the bottom if I scraped off the thermal paste http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2443597

not quite, I'm gonna go take a picture, as well as loot the fan from this power supply and install it in the back of the case

actually I was wondering, is one kind of thermal paste better than another? I was looking on newegg and there are just so many different options at so many different prices, I'm temptedto go with the cheapest as is my nature, but if it's not gonna transfer heat as well then I don't want it.

guess I really should download a program to monitor the heat.

actually my heatsink is really hardcore, I don't know the numbers or brand on it but it's big and cricle and has a decent sized fan right in the center of it, plus I'm in a cold room with it, no heat in that part of the house. every now and then I like to restart my computer and take it into bios to check the temp and I've yet to see it top 45c, but it's also running off old thermal paste I literally had to scrape off of it to another processor that I thought worked because I didn't have the money to buy any new paste, then I found out that processor didn't work and had to scrape all the paste back. I'm gonna be ordering some fresh stuff soon but right now it's staying decently cool so I guess that's all that matters. also if I can't fix the power supply I'm gonna be looting this giant light up fan out of a power supply I have. anyway I'm at my friends house right now with her new gaming computer, did a tiny overclock on it, didn't want to do much for fear of messing up her brand new computer, but it was running a bus speed of 100 with a multiplier of 27, I just popped the multiplier up to 30 to put her at 3ghz as well as shut off cool n quiet. and I'm probably gonna leave it at that as the thing IS brand new and I don't wanna hurt it, it's running an AMD A6-3670. quad core, seems fast haha, bios says that the max frequency is 4.2ghz but that just feels dangerous

thanks sorry for being such a noob but what program should I use to test? as of last night it was running at 2.2ghz and I wasn't sure how to go about testing it so I basically just put a movie on loop in windows media player and let it play all night, came back in the morning and everything was still running smoothly but I'm sure that can't be a decent test, I've seen a lot of programs listed on the internet and the one that keeps popping up the most is prime95, is that one pretty good?

okay, let me start by saying I'm kind of new to overclocking, not new to computers at all, just never bothered with overclocking. anyway my current desktop setup is not necessarily slow, but could be faster, it's a little outdated, I've been pulling parts from anywhere I can get them free, the main source being my dads old pc which the cpu went out on, right now I'm running an AMD athlon 64 X2 3600+ on a Biostar TA780G M2+ with 8 gigs of DDR2, anyway if I let the thing do whatever it wants the cpu runs at a bus speed of 200mhz with a multiplier of 10x putting my speed at 2000mhz. I don't have the money to buy a faster processor so I'm trying to speed this up a bit by overclocking, not running any programs for it, just what I can change in BIOS, I went to 220 bus speed and it still seems stable, 230 crashed. but I heard that raising the bus speed can crash your computer faster than the multiplier, so I was wanting to raise my multiplier some, but 10X seems to be the max it will let me go. is there anything I can do about this? I mean my laptop, a lenovo thinkpad T61 is running at 12x right now, my friends new "gaming" computer is running at 27x, but I account that to the quad core. anyway, is there anything I can do to jack up my multiplier a bit? also, when I upped my bus speed it upped the speed of my memory, CPU-Z tells me that the max bandwidth is "pc2-6400 (400mhz)" but after upping my bus speed my memory has jacked itself up to 440mhz, should I be lowering the voltage on that to bring it back down to 400 or is it okay? I realize I'm taking some ammount of risk on all my components when I overclock but I don't have the money to buy 8 more gigs of ram if I kill this stuff. sorry if this seems kind of all over the place, I'll list me specs again. motherboard: Biostar TA780g M2+ Ram: kingston DDR2 2gb x 4 = 8gb CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ ps. can anybody explain this "HT link" to me, I found one guy talking about it in an overclocking guide but I didn't really understand what it is. right now on CPU-Z it says 1100mhz