I'm no overclocking guru, but from experience I've found that overclocking is very touchy (no matter what brand of mobo) when you have the max amount of ram installed. When the CPU is strongly overclocked, ram will barely run at stock speed. If you push the ram speed up you're limited on the CPU speed options.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. - Still learning.
I think it depends on what you are running. An intel system is a completely different animal than an AMD system. A Sandy Bridge is different still. I'm a long way from a guru on overclocking, but I have had all 3 systems and each is different. Amd systems at default sets ram, no matter what kind you have, to 1333 9-9-9-24. Adjustments have to be made to run it any other frequency. Intels work diffetent. Sandy Bridge, you are not overclocking the CPU per se, you are OC the turbo function.
I set everything back to auto in the BIOS and loaded the systems normal settings. The cpu is running at 3.2GHz and the dram is @1333 9-9-9-24. The M5A88-V EVO motherboard comes with some overclocking and systems utilities. According to the manual, You can push the cpu from 3.2GHz up to 3.9GHz and the ram up to DDR3 2000 (O.C.) but I found out the system doesn't boot or it becomes unstable. I'll leave it set to normal. Once I learn more about it I will change some settings. Thanks to everyone for helping.
I'm glad you got it running stable. As far as the ram. I think what it is saying is that if you install DDR3-2000, the machine will automatically set it to 1333, but you can overclock it to get your DDR3-2000 ram to run at 2000. 1333 ram will not run at 2000. It is good that you have it stable now. Good luck.
Just because your BIOS allows you to overclock your system, it doesn't mean to say that you can or that you will be able to upto the limit permitted by the BIOS. Overclockability depends very much on your hardware (CPU/RAM), and you will find that some are more tolerant to overclocking than others.
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