BleepingComputer.com: Overclocking Performance

I started fiddling around with overclocking lately. I have a Core 2 Duo E4400 (2.0ghz), which I heard people were getting up to 3.6ghz on air a while back. Anyway while overclocking, I went up to 2.5 ghz by raising the fsb from 800 to 1000 (my motherboard doesn't display it in QDR for some reason). It was set so the memory and fsb were linked, but the ratio was set to Auto whatever that is. So when I raised my fsb to 1000, it underclocked my ram from 800mhz to 750mhz. It's kind of cheap ram, team elite brand, but it still works well. So I decide to set the ratio to 1:1 because I've read a few places that that gives the best performance. Well, haha, my computer wouldn't boot correctly. with the ram at 1000mhz so I had to clear the cmos.

Now I set the ram and fsb to unlinked and cranked the fsb to 1200, making my processor 3.0ghz. It seems to be running faster, but is this much improvement at all? My Fsb is 1200mhz while my ram is running at only 800mhz. Also, I'll add that while gaming for about an hour at 3.0ghz my processor was only at 39.0C, and idles at about 23-28C. My old Pentium 4 use to get much hotter. Any advice or help is greatly appreciated!

As you've found out, overclocking can get a bit complicated. I usually refer overclocking questions to http://www.overclockers.com

All the performance benchmarks in the world don't mean diddly if you can't see the increase in performance. That's why I gave up on overclocking (and tweaking) - I just didn't see enough improvement to make it worth my while.

Sure, I can get my superpi scores seconds faster, but overclocking seems to mean near to nothing in regular performance for me. Only difference I've found is overclocking my graphics card. It was a lot easier than overclocking my processor too. I use rivatuner for my 7600gt.

Ok thanks for everyones input! I use to overclock my old PCI X1300 graphics card a bit, but I've never done it to my X1900GT. Maybe in the future when I start noticing it's age more, but for now I think my defaults are good enough