Hmm... Some Noob Questions About Ext. Clock / Volt

[DrAwesomePhD]

Alright... wlel i have an IC7-MAX3 motherboard with a prescott 3.0ghz HT 800mhz FSB processor... I went to check out the bios' overclocking settings and it had actually two things i could change.. the external clock and the voltage. the voltage is currently 1.375V and external clock 200... If i was planning on overclocking, which of these should i change? by how much? i can do the external clock by every Mhz and the voltage by i think every .025V or something... which is the safest/most effective...

 

Also, I changed the external clock to 215 once, it worked well... but i couldnt see my SATA drive... why is this?

[r_target]

You may not have locked the AGP/PCI busses, and were running them too far out of spec, and Windows couldn't see your HDD. Anyway, on the Softmenu page, go down to where it says "CPU/AGP/PCI ratio" or something very close to that. Hit enter and you'll see some options like 6/2/1 and some others. Also on the list is "fixed"-choose that.

 

Now you should be able to start raising your front side bus, and thusly you CPU's external clock, without any strange things like disappearing drives. Take it slow, no more than 10 Mhz at a time. Don't worry about raising the voltage just yet, you will probably get the bulk of your OC at or near stock voltage.