What OC can I reasonably expect?

Question

Now that the last of my cooling parts and my new Enermax 420w PSU have finally come in, I'm ready to try some OCing on my system, as soon as I get everything installed.  I know it's variable depending on individual components, but approximately how high of an OC should I generally be able to get to with my P4 3.0 Northwood and decent air cooling?  I'll be using a Thermalright XP-90 with AS5 and a Thermaltake 92mm Silent Cat fan to keep the cpu cool, and I've got 1 gig of Kingston HyperX PC3200 memory with heat spreaders, and sinks on the mosfets and PLL chips.  Everything is listed in my signature.  Also, what are the upper limits for safe temps, idle and load, for this cpu?

Answer 1

I'm not too familiar with P4 chips, but generally speaking it's usually reasonable to expect to be able to overclock at least 10 to 15% with a modern CPU, a decent MB, and decent air cooling, so I'd say 3.4 GHz would be a good, safe target.  Of course, you might get lucky and wind up with a chip that can overclock by more like 30% and up using air (although this is more likely with an AMD chip than a P4), or extremely unlucky and end up with a chip that is just barely stable with a 10% overclock, but anyways, 10 to 15% is usually a safe, easily attainable overclock.
As far as safe temps go, I'm not sure given that it's a P4, but I do know that the built-in thermal protection on the P4 is fairly good, and it will ramp its clock speed down before it lets itself get hot enough to cause any internal damage.