To OC correctly is more about another whole website than a thread on this one, there is just way too much involved. This is a good place to start,
Overclockers Forums - The Performance Computing Community (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/)
For piece of mind though, you cant really do alot of damage with modern processors, they will shut down, or not even boot if they dont like what you're doing to them.
So get Prime95 for stress testing and have a play, but seriously, you are prob wasting your time until you find settings that some Geek has had working on your exact system for a while.
With all that in mind, my PC nerd friend told me that if your chip does fail within the warranty period, Intel knows its been OC'd and wont honor the warranty.
It doesnt really worry me, ( Ive been trying to kill my i7 920 for about 20 months now, but the little bugger just keeps on going, lol ) but if pennies are tight, the 'no warranty' could be a concern.
Good luck.
PS. any less than 4Ghz isnt really trying :)

I do not expect any trouble, but I will only be able to tell whether/how it works once I get my power supply. Newegg has yet to ship it, unfortunately, so I will not receive it until next week.

Just so you know I have not been ignoring you but it turned out the problem was not the power supply but the motherboard. It took NewEgg a while to replace, but it has finally arrived today. I have just installed Windows 7, so the motherboard accepted the "unapproved" RAM without a hitch (just as I expected, as motherboard manufacturers often list approved memory because they have a deal with the memory manufacturing companies).

Now I have to change all the Windows settings to my liking (such as moving the default directory to install programs to my second hard drive as I want to keep the main drive strictly for system use) which I will probably do tomorrow since it is past 11 pm here.

Adam, I might be mistaken, but I don't believe that installing programs to anything but the C drive is necessary. As I said, I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

There is a lot of misinformation about doing that. If there is a gain, it would be so slight that it certainly wouldn't be worth the trouble. If your "program" drive is faster, than yes you would be better off. But in that case you should have put the OS (and everything else) on that drive, not the secondary drive.

There are lots of people on the net that simply look for "new" ways of trying things for the sake of trying it and trying to squeeze more speed out of their system. They tinker, and experiment for the sake of playing with it...I know, I did it for years.

Some people use a secondary drive for their paging file, but again, is it worth it? I think not unless you are using memory instensive applications, which Vegas is not.

If your primary hard disc is fast to begin with, I would consider letting it go and installing to the default location.

To do otherwise is an unecessary complication, in my opinion.

agree entirely with jeff....

years ago i thought along similar lines; keep my system drive clean and fast, programs on another....

DON'T DO IT!! you'll find that once you start telling programs to install to other than default plug-ins, etc., will start going astray and you'll end up with a real registry mess.....

let alone updates that don't even give options of where to update!

Yeah I agree as well.
I actually do this now, Win 7 on my SSD with Vegas (first install after windows) and CS4. All my other programs are on a partition on another 7200rpm drive.
I gotta say the performance gain is nothing that I can see or check with benchmarks, and the hassles that sometimes arise are a small pain ( nothing major, but still annoying ).
On my next Windows install its all going on the C drive, neat and easy.
In saying that though, Ive read that people are having two or more SSD drives in Raid 0 and that gives an incredible experience across the board, hmmmmm, tempting.....

wow, raid 0 with ssd drives...sounds insanely fast.

The problem is that when your computer dies and you install a new system, the system installer often wipes the drive clean. My email software (Eudora), for example keeps all the email data on the same drive as itself.

Additionally, many programs install things on drive C: without asking. So, no matter how large the drive is, it tends to fill up. By installing everything on a different drive, I am reasonably sure my drive C: will not fill up for as long as this computer build lives.

Anyway, drives are cheap these days, so I like to keep my system drive for the system.

I got three drives for this new build. Two 1 TB drives (C: and D:) and one 2 TB drive which I put in an external eSATA enclosure (so it gets its own power supply), which is mostly for data I want to be able to access by my laptop or simply have the ability to swap it for a different drive just for different video projects.

Most importantly, however, separate drives have separate connectors to the motherboard, so the system can read the applications without interfering with all the system software (so the system and the other software can be loaded simultaneously). That keeps everything lean and mean.

This exchange of ideas is a good thing, and I'm glad you are posting and letting us know what is happening.

Adam, you mention "So, no matter how large the drive is, it tends to fill up." That is not quite true.

Not even close my friend. I have a 150GB drive for my OS and I have many large programs, never exceed 60GB in space used. If you maintain your hard drive properly it will not fill up. When you make dvds in DVDA use another drive for processing, not C. Aside from that the idea it will eventually fill up is not true.

Why would you not just use the extra drive and run RAID 0 if you want speed? That's how the big boys do it.

You're thinking that the different connectors keep things separate is not accurate or relevant. If the drives are running off of the same controller it makes no difference which connectors they use.

You want your video files running off a separate controller and hard drive, but with programs it makes no difference to speak of.

It would appear you are finding your information from an assortment of places where amateurs gather. I've seen lots of tech wannabes put this theory out in various place. For our types of setups it doesn't apply.

Leslie has said he used to do it and now understands it is a mistake. I have been building systems for years, and I've never thought it was a good idea.

I have over a dozen drives in my system, I don't waste even one for the paging file...let alone programs. Drives are cheap, but $300 dollars is still $300. I don't have that kind of money to waste.

At any rate, the worst thing that will happen is you'll waste a hard drive you could be using to run RAID 0, which would be much faster than what you are planning.

Bottom line, I could still be mistaken, but I don't think I am. I think you're just wasting a hard drive and creating unnecessary confusion for yourself. At any rate, best of luck. Enjoy your new PC. Glad it is coming together for you!

Keep us posted!

One more thing Adam. Experienced PC users never keep email, etc on the OS drive without backing it up to another drive.

I could lose everything on my C drive at any time, and I would lose absolutely nothing.

The fact that you use Eudora may be a whole other issue, but I find it hard to beleive you cannot back it up to another drive every couple of days, or at least weekly. To not have it backed up on the web, I couldn't even imagine.

I have one internal backup for everything, and an exact copy of that drive on an external. That's how you do it Adam.

I store NO images, video, nothing on my C drive. Not even documents. When I install Windows the first thing I do is remove all references to My Photos, My Documents, etc. Don't need or want windows to manage anything for me.

It would appear you are finding your information from an assortment of places where amateurs gather.

Now, that's just funny. I have been computing since 1965 (yes, 1965, that is not a typo), since before Windows, Mac, MS DOS, personal computers, even before Unix.

It does not matter that the drives are connected to the same controller. Hardware works quite differently from software. It can be just one controller but it uses separate paths for the electrons that run through the wires. Plus the hard disk has to physically move to access the data, so if it is spread over two disks it happens twice as fast.

And yes, hard drives fill up. It took me a year to fill up a 10 megabyte drive in the eighties (that was a big drive back then). I replaced it with a 100 megabyte drive which I filled in half the time. Then we went to hundreds of gigabytes and they still filled up. Now we are in terrabytes, and they will still fill up because the amount of data, as well as the size of the software grows exponentially.

The system drive is for the system. Data drives are for data. Program drives are for programs.

Now, I have never suggested that anyone else needs to use a separate drive for the system. But to imply I am some kind of amateur because I do is rather laughable. When it comes to computers I am an old pro, a very old one. I do not do what I do because of someone else's advice, I do it because I have 45 years of experience doing it.

Well, like I said, I could be wrong. And it woudn't be the first time!

I'm somewhere in the middle. I have a system/application drive, everything gets installed there. But I hack/move my home directory (or Users, or whatever windows calls it) to the secondary drive, or even drive letter if it's one physical HD. For the simple reason that with windows, when you reinstall, you lose all the program config anyway, so they all need to get reinstalled. BUT, I'm very careful (well... normally =) to only keep data on the data drive. I also create swapfiles on both, although that's far less critical now-a-days.

Then, a clean install is simply formatting C:, and reinstalling. But all my data is safe.

And, email can be so critical, I don't even bother keeping it local. I use IMAP exclusively. Not only is it all stored on the server, but it's perfectly in sync if I login via the webmail client and read/delete/move emails around. IMAP is seriously the only way to go if you want to have a local client.

OK... back to diff'ing the latest de-interlacing source files... =/

And, for the record, I think the programs on a separate drive is more old school than newb. In the "old" days, moving the apps off from the system drive, especially onto a different hard drive, could make a huge difference. Not only because the app code wasn't on the main swapfile drive, but there was so little memory, and drives were so slow that it really did matter. When a super-fast drive was the 28ms version instead of the 40ms version, and the transfer rates were measured in KBs instead of GBs per second, and when SCSI was the by far preferred choice could it could enqueue multiple requests and service them even out of order whereas IDE (pffft, consumer stuff) couldn't even talk to two drives on the same channel at the same time. =)
We did everything we could to eke out every bit of performance.

I still remember when I gave up the ISDN internet line to go with a cable modem, and being amazed that I could download something from my home country of South Africa (I'm now in Canada) to my HD faster than I could off my first CD-ROM to my HD! It was a single speed, 150K/second.

Things sure have, and continue to, change at a remarkable rate.

Craig, you're right, it is an old school thing...newbies pick up on it not realizing it doesn't apply anymore. Extra drives are now used for RAID configurations or storage. Heck it seems everyone has a RAID system. It's like the huge number of pickup truck in the city where I live. Very few need a pickup truck, but it seems people want them anyway, and the bigger the better.

RAID used to be expensive, but now it's virtually free. My old SCSI controller card cost $1500, and my cheetah drives were very expensive also. Yet today I get a SATA controller that is RAID ready at no extra charge built into my motherboard.

And keeping email local...I can't even imagine a reason, unless you have a very unreliable connection. Even still, it should be backed up on the provider's server.