overclocking your DAW (temps)

I have an AMD athalon x2 5000+ black edition. It runs at the stock clock settings around 2.5 Ghx per core. Cpu temps hover around 29-30C. With very step up in the multiplier I see a 5-10% reduction in CPU useage in Sonar.

I have OC'd it to 3.2Ghz by using a 16x multiplier, and upping the core voltage to 1.475v. Now I am seeing core temps of 50c, but the system seems stable, and what was a 75% CPU load on one song, is now down to 50%!

Is this still safe, or should I back it off a little? I'm considering upgrading to a 6400+ black edition to get the unlocked multiplier again, and start where this CPU maxes out.

Well, I backed it off. I ran a temp monitor during daw operation, and temps were reaching 60c and it was scaring me. I found that 70c was the maximum max operating temp according to info I googled. I spent the better part of last night plying with vcore temps, the multiplier, and the bus frequency. I was able to get 3.17ghz per core and get my biggest songs to stress it out. During monitoring, the max temp I saw was 48c after the change...so that's a decent amout of headroom for me.

I was getting CPU spikes before that were causing spikes, pops, and sometimes dropouts. It seems to run much smoother now. I went into the sytem proporties, and under advanced>performance>memory, I chose system cache over programs. Then changed the buffer in Sonar in 1024 for playback. It really calmed down the spikes and doesn't seem to add to the latency.

I may step up to the 6400+ athlon to keep things happy for a while...but looks like I really hit the wall with my current MOBO and AM2 chip. It is just enough to run current projects, but there is really not enough headroom left. I have a micro atx case, so my options are limited a little, but looks like I'll be shopping for a quad core eventually.
I'm an AMD fan, but until they get their act together...for a DAW it seems the intel is the way to go!

Search and download orthos. Fire up your temperature monitoring software x 2 (they can vary quite a bit so run 2 different monitors) and run a stress test with orthos. Some people recommend running a stress test overnight but I run it for about an hour. I figure that's more stress than Sonar and a few plugin's is going to put on it.

You'll know whether it's okay 'cos overheating will cause BSOD and other crashes. As a rule of thumb you don't want to be getting above 65C.