From reading about AMD's processors OCing very well, and of course wanting to get every bit of performance out of my processor as I can, ive been looking into the process of overclocking a lot lately, but so far, I've been having a difficult time with it.

Could anybody actually spell out the steps you go through to overclock? I've tried to follow several guides, but none of them really seem to make any sense, and BIOS settings are difficult soemtimes to understand.

There's always software OCing, but ive heard that its not as good as doing it through the BIOS for several reasons.

For reference, my cpu is an AMD Fx-6300.

to overclock your CPU, there's 2 ways:

increase the multiplier

increase the bclck

Most CPUs have a locked multiplier. I am unsure if the 6300 has this limitation, but increasing the multiplier is the simplest way to make your cpu faster. Simply raise it one or two levels. My old athlon 4200+ had a 11x multiplier, and I was unable to increase that any since it was locked.

The other way to overclock is to increase the bclck. this increases the base clock of the cpu, before the multiplier. So a 220 MHz cpu with 11 multiplier will be 2420 MHz. Increasing the bclck also has an effect on the rest of the system, most notably the RAM. Your ram is set up to run as a factor of the bclck, so in order to overclock your ram, you must also overclock the bclck or increase the ratio. Overlclocking ram depends heavily on the bios. The easy answer is to just knock the ratio down one and increase the bclck to compensate, since RAM is pretty finicky.

When you first start out, don't worry about changing the voltages. This is the only way you're going to kill your computer. Overclocking to a non stable clock is easily fixed. Putting too much voltage on your CPU is not.

tl;dr
leave voltages alone, increase the multiplier if you can, otherwise increase the bclck.

To have a stable OC of any real value however, you'll need to mess with voltages as the auto settings will give far too much voltage.

Read up tutorials on OCing the particular processor you're interested in. With luck someone has done it on the same motherboard you'll be using. The UEFI BIOS most new mobos have helps a lot too.

Make sure you have adequate cooling as well, I do not recommend stock CPU heatsinks if you are OCing.

Yeah, i bought an aftermarket cooler thats proven to be a beast with it, so im fine on cooling.

So far ive been able to OC to 4.4 Ghz with about a 10% boost to volatage (at 1.35v right now) and its very stable (tested with 8 hours on Prime95). CPU temp under full load is anywhere from 57-60C. Idle its usually under 30.