I try to overcloack for first time...can you help??

Question

Hello Everybody
I bought my system a year ago,and  I start it to be more confident on the pc so I ve decided to try to overcloack ....
I used core centre...i reached around 3.2 (from 2.6) and invariably the system crashes.
Can anybody help this poor guy,that knows little about PC`s???
And /or maybe i set up the hardware in a bad way???
I hope somebody will understand my english(I`m Italian) and help....
I thank  you all
MS-6728 P4 DDR S478 865PE Neo2-FIS2R Motherboard  BIOS Version/Date   American Megatrends Inc. V1.5, 08/09/2003
Pentium 4 2.6GHz 800 Processor FPGA (on system info is displayed that i have 2processors...dont know why)
400W PSU for ATX PC Case
512Mb PC2700 184pin DDR DIMM Memory (u reccommend 400 mhz?)cpu-z tells me that frequency is 159.6 mhz and performance mode...disabled)
256MB ATI Radeon 9200DVI DDR Tv Out
2x 120Gb 180GXP 7200rpm ATA 8mb Cache Hard Drive (2ghether on the onboard raid promise)

Answer 1

Overclocking is not an exact science. It depends heavily on many factors including motherboard, RAM, an dthe CPU. Off the bat i can tell you that you probably won't get very far with PC2700. To get even a small OC you need some decent quality PC3200. but then, its only rated at 400Mhz so your not going to get much over 430Mhz on it. If you really want to OC, you need some faster PC3700 (DDR433) or DDR500 (PC4000). Even then, it is difficult to achieve a stable overclock because of the other two factors, how far you can push the CPU and Motherboard. It is essentially a trial and error process. Push the FSB up a couple points and see if it's stable, then back of a bit when the machine crashes. A good tool to use is Memtest86+, which will test your memory for any errors while overclocked. You can download it here.