Morning all

Having finally won enough money playing poker I've decided to upgrade my desktop at last. That being said I've wanted to get the most bang for my buck and have just upgraded most of the components in my old PC. Obviously I'm going to over clock however I'm going to undertake this mission by using pretty standard / budget (ish) hardware and see where I end up.

New PC specs are as follows:

Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.13 stock
2 X 1 gig Samsung DDR 800 (Memory is insanely cheap at the moment, nows the time to get some)I specifically didn't get gaming or low latency memory as I cant really justify the cost
Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard - best balance of quality, performance and price I could find.
Gigabyte Geforce 8800 GTS 640mb - Ok this isn't budget at all but I just had to have one (will be OCing this as well)
Aopen 700w power supply
2 X 250gb SATA
1 X 200gb SATA
1 X 35gb Raptor SATA (System drive for OS and most used apps)
Coolermaster case with standard fans.

The aim of this experiment is to find how far I can push this system on stock cooling, this should hopefully give the other forum users an idea of what to expect should they try something similar. The main reason for doing things this way as previous overclocking adventures I've had generally wind up costing loads due to having to buy very high end motherboards, memory, coolers etc.

OS will be Vista Ultimate 32bit and latest drivers for everything will be used. Any questions, comments or suggestions please send them to me.
As soon as my PSU arrives I'll build and start playing and let you guys know the results.

ooooh. this sounds like it will be very interesting. I will keep a close eye on this adventure.

I think your decision to go for cheaper memory may be your downfall when overclocking, but give it a go and let's see the results.

Very nice upgrade from your previous rig though

Right so far we have the processor running smoothly at 3ghz, memory multiplier is set to 2.5 so memory is running a 775 or so.
As soon as I can figure out why 3dmark 06 doesnt like vista I'll post some benchies.
No OC on the 8800 yet, I'm still getting around setting everything up my way on the PC.

Also I due to lack of stock I went for a thermaltake toughpower 700 PSU. Tis Mighty fine with tons and tons of connectors. Highly recommended

There's an update patch for 3DMark to fix some compatibility issues with Vista, make sure you grab it.

Ideally your RAM shouldn't be on a divider: perhaps underclock your CPU and then see how far the RAM can go by itself?

pity you could have gotten further with the x2900xt. but nice buy... lets hope your ram can sustain further clocking as ideally you would rather have 1:1 memory/cpu ratio.

Ok multiplier for CPU set to 7 and FSB at 440 = 3080Mhz Memory running at 880 no issues whatsoever,
FSB voltage +0.1 ,DDR +0.2 CPU voltage 1.4 v total

Sisoft sandra showing some nice scores, *grin*
Will post benchies soon. Still no 8800 OC as I'm just enjoying the speed of vista for now

try push to the 500MHz barrier see if your RAM will take you there because @ 500MHz you'll be running 1000 (mm)