Overclocking?

If your motherboard is a H97, that means it can't overclock. Z97 means it can overclock. Although you can mess with a few settings...

Additionally you cannot overclock a non-K Intel CPU, except perhaps a bit of BCLK overclocking, which is dependant on your motherboard, but this will give you little advantage for a lot of work...

I believe that your only limited to these types of overclocks:

https://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-overclocking-software-15-top-apps-721381

Personally I wouldn't bother..

Thecageyone wrote: »

I would upgrade the RAM first, 12GB is a bit odd, is that 2 sticks of 4? Or a 4 +8? either way you're probably not benefiting anymore than you would from 8GB [2x4] - Get 2 sticks of decent 8GB and you'll notice a bump in performance.

Have to dissent there. Unless you're hitting your memory limit or accessing virtual/pagefile memory a lot, there's no need. Up until someone threw old sticks at me @ work to use, I was happy to use 8GB in my machine for the longest time running Solidworks, Matlab, gaming and all else; it was only a combination of a lot of multitasking while playing heavier titles that saw me regularly hit that cap, so I went to 16 GB. That said if you're managing your tasks and only doing things for gaming etc. then 12 GB should be ample, more is only going to net you perhaps marginal increases in performance while tabbing between apps.

Unfortunately on team Blue, overclocking is harder to do as they lock the multiplier in most cases.