Overclocking
 

It's been a while since we've had the pleasure of overclocking AMD CPU's.  The experience is quite different than Intel.  I had to research all of the settings to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.  The basics are still the same, but squeezing the most out of your CPU and motherboard requires intimate knowledge of your components.  Fortunately, there are tons of great places and great people to answer all of your questions.  We were able to take our 9950 from stock settings to 3.0Ghz at a very modest CPU voltage of 1.375v.  I was able to load windows at 3.4GHz at 1.41v but couldn't get all of my benchmarks to run.  If you want to press your luck, I'm sure that with a little more tweaking and a little more voltage, 3.4GHz would be stable.

Testing
 

For testing we are going to run the Phenom X4 9950 through a bunch of benchmarks, from synthetic to gaming.  I'll show each benchmark as completely default and as overclocked.  Settings for each benchmark will be listed.  Test system is as follows.
 

SiSoft Sandra