Is overclocking a net "+" or "-" in C7.5.10?

Overclocking is generally a + indeed, as long as your system remains stable. There are some things to consider: Overclocking involves increasing the voltage over components, which means they will produce more heat which means your cooling has to be adequate. Your fans will speed up more to compensate for the extra heat so they will produce more noise than they would without an overclock. If you have good quality fans and a soundproof case (like you do in your new build) this shouldn’t be an issue.

When overclocking, what I always do is go up in very small increments and do extensive testing for stability each time. This is very time consuming but I’d rather stay on the safe side and not go too far. You won’t easily break your hardware in my experience, but I prefer to be careful. I have no experience with your chipset and motherboard so how easy it is to overclock I can’t tell, but there should be plenty of overclocking guides on the internet. Make sure your CPU can overclock though, I’m not sure but you may have selected a CPU with a locked multiplier which means you can’t do much in terms of overclocking. Intel 4xxxK CPU models have unlocked multipliers (it’s the K at the end that tells you this), these are much better suited for overclocking.

What I personally do for stress-testing a new clock is the following. I use a free small utility called Speedfan which can read your hardware temperatures and plot them in a graph in real time. I use that for temperature monitoring, if your temperatures go too high you know your cooling isn’t adequate for your current clock and you should return to a lower clockspeed. (Or get better cooling obviously :slight_smile:). To test the system I use another free utility called Prime95. This is a piece of software that will compute very complex mathematical problems (problems that take your PC a good few minutes to solve) and then checks if the outcome is correct. Pick ‘torture test’ from the menu and select as many ‘workers’ as you have cores on your CPU, so each core will have its own problem to solve. Leave that running for a good while (an hour or so) and check if none of the workers reported any wrong answers. If all is fine (and your temperatures are acceptable during this test) then your clock is stable and you can try increasing it some more. Note that while running prime95 your CPU will be taxed to 100% so your PC may be a bit unresponsive as it’s kinda busy, but that’s the idea :wink:. Also note that this type of testing is an extreme case. When using Cubase you will never run your CPU at 100% load all the time so some people don’t even mind if Prime95 gives the odd error every now and then at a certain clockspeed.

In short: Watch your temperatures under load to avoid damage, and check if the CPU you picked is actually capable of overclocking. The Z87 chipset you have should be fine for ‘casual’ overclocking, more than what your selected cooling can handle I imagine.