I had been planning on writing an article on overclocking the Athlon 64 CPU for a while, and actually got a good ways into the process when I realized that it would be best to write two separate articles; one for the socket 754 and one for the socket 939. So, I did just that. Before we go much further, I would highly recommend reading over the 754 article, or at least the first three pages anyway. The first few pages of that article cover some of the key elements involved in the recipe for a good overclock, including CPU cooling, power supply choice and RAM selection. It would be repetitive to post that information here, so be sure to check it out if you think your system might be lacking in any of those areas.

With that being said, let's jump right in and check out the system components.