I made a thread >1 week ago asking for help with my FPS problems during raids. You guys suggested that I should overclock my CPU to gain some performance. I've never overclocked anything before but I did some reading and learned how to do it. I've now overclocked my CPU successfully, but I've ran into some problems/mysteries I'd love some help with to sort out. (Also, I realised I never said thank you to the people who helped me in my previous thread and it felt stupid bumping it after this long, so if you're reading this; Thank you for your help!)

When I started learning how to overclock my Intel i5 2500K (3,3GHz), the guide I followed told me to first download 3 different softwares that I would use later to monitor and stress test my overclock. Those programs I've downloaded are; CPU-Z, RealTemp and Prime95. The first mystery I ran into was when I hadn't even begun trying to overclock my CPU, I found that CPU-Z told me that my "Core Speed" was at 4326 and my "Multiplier" was at 42. I found this really weird since my CPU is supposed to be at 3,3GHz when not yet overclocked. At first I had no idea why it was telling me this, so I just ignored it and moved on. Later on I learned that my CPU must've been overclocked from when I bought it. I did buy all my PC parts brand new and I built the computer myself. I have a very vague memory that something in my shopping basket was tagged as "factory overclocked", but I've always rememberd it to have been my GPU. I guess I was wrong. But how is it even possible to overclock the CPU when I bought all the computer parts seperatley (although all in the same order and from the same store)?
Anyway, this wasn't one of my problems I've ran into. I'm just curious as to how it was possible that my CPU was overclocked from factory.



Now, the main question I would like help with is if you guys think that my overclock is stable enough. The settings that my CPU STARTED with was; BCLK: 103 MHz, CPU Multiplier: 42, Additional Turbo Voltage: Auto and Offset Voltage: Auto.

The guide I was following told me to always leave BCLK at 100 MHz, so I was surprised that mine was set to 103. This is obviously also the reason why my Core Speed was at the odd number 4326 originally. I decided to change BCLK to 100 MHz like the guide said.

Now, to the overclocking. I changed a bunch of weird settings that the guide told me to change. Some of them were harder to find since the guide didnt use the same motherboard as me so some settings wernt there or had a slightly different name. But the main settings I've ended up with are: BCLK: 100 MHz, CPU Multiplier: 45, Additional Turbo Voltage: +0.008 and Offset Voltage: +0.005.
I put BCLK at 100 since my guide told me to leave it there. The highest CPU Multiplier I could pull off without blue screening almost instantly whilst stress testing was 45. I had to increase Additional Turbo Voltage to +0.008 from the lowest +0.004 since it stopped me from crashing whilst stress testing ~10 minutes in. The guide told me to leave Offset Voltage at the lowest (+0.005) as long as my computer boot-up was stable, which it is.
These settings give's me a 4500 MHz Core Speed and Core Voltage jumping between 1.376-1.392 V whilst stress testing. The temperature of the CPU, according to RealTemp, never went higher then 82' Celcius, atleast for the first 4 hours. Since I was asleep for the rest of the test I don't know if it went higher before it blue screened.

These settings ran flawlessly for 4 hours in Prime 95's "In-place large FFTs" stress test. I then went to bed. When I woke up, I realised my computer had restarted itself. This obviously means that it blue screened sometime whilst I was sleeping. A friend of mine told me he had seen me log onto skype (which happens automatically when my PC boots) about 10 hours after I started the stress test. This leads me to believe that the CPU passed the stress test for 10 hours before blue screening.
My question is: Do you guys think 10 hours in Prime95 stress test and then blue screen is stable enough? I've read different opinions about this. Some says they wont settle without having a CPU that can run Prime95 for 24+ hours without errors, whilst some say that if you pass ~4 hours without problems you'll be fine, since no real game will ever push your CPU to the same limit that Prime95 does. I havn't played much WoW after I tampered with my BIOS settings, but I've instead played a ton of DOTA 2. I've never crashed or blue screened yet, and I've had these settigns for almost a week now. Does this means that I can safely assume that I won't be having problems in WoW either? WoW is obviously a much more CPU heavy game, but it's still not near as intense as Prime95, right?

PS: I did the 2 first bosses in the first wing of SoO LFR and the CPU temperature never when above 62' Celcius and the Core Voltage seemed to not go above 1.368 V during boss fights.



Another question/concern I have is regarding my RAM memories and if they've potentially been overclocked from factory (just like my CPU had been without me knowing it). The reason I'm suspecting they might've been is beacuse I occasionally crash, and sometimes even blue screen, when I play WoW. The WoW-error message I get pretty much every time is "Error #132. Memory could not be read". I've googled this error message but I never really found a good answer. People/blizzard's FAQ site said it was either out-dated drivers (which I've made sure are updated) or an unstable memory overclock (which I never thought I had since I've never touched BIOS before).

I actually have no clue of how you overclock RAM memories, so I can't check if my settings have been tampered with, and if that's potentially the problem. However, from reading a tiny bit about it, is it correct that the "BCLK" also affects/boosts RAM memories? If yes, could the fact that my original BIOS settings had BCLK set to 103 instead of 100 be the reason why I had these crashes? Like I said before, I havn't played much WoW after changing my BIOS settings, so I can't confirm that this error isn't occuring anymore, but so far I havn't had that error message/crash since changing it.

Another possibility I've considered is that perhaps my RAM memories are broken and need's to be replaced? Although I find it unlikely since they seem to work 99% of the time.
Is there a similar program to Prime95 that specifically test's my RAM so that I can make sure they are working properly and perhaps, if they're overclocked, stable?



Sorry for the wall of text. I'm very new to overclocking and I'm pretty bad at making short posts.
Thank you so much for any help!