Super Gnu - I’m in the same situation, I’ve a 3930k with a thermalright macho on it running for the past few weeks - do you have a solid guide or article that you follow to overclock on this?
hehe well there are a million articles online, but i didnt follow a specific one myself.. can give some suggestions, but really if you google your motherboard name plus overclocking, youll get what you need.. however if either of you want further tips i can give a basic methodologly for oc’ing sandybridge later.. bit busy atm..
with regards to a step by step guide to building a computer, i suspect google might be your friend 
p.s. 16gb of ram isnt a small amount.. for the vast majority of scenes its plenty. more always better of course.
I am just testing overclocking… Quite fun can see what you mean. My computer crashed with 4.8 ghz overclocking so now i am trying 4.7 ghz.
I have downloaded ada64 to monitor system, and I am doing a render right now with 4.7 ghz. And when I look in the monitor I can see some warning about overheating.. See this file.
Should I go further down to 4.6 or adjust some other settings.?
erm. the general idea with overclocking is to start at a low level, and once it is stable, work your way up bit by bit.
4.7 is very high if you only have a standard set of cooling. im not surprised you have overheating warnings. (and try to be more specific.. “some warning about overheating” should be “my cpu is at 107 degrees, is this too hot?”) since the software will certainly tell you the temp. try to understand what you are doing before diving in at the deep end.
start at a nice sensible 4ghz or so, make sure you have temp monitoring software (realtemp is good) so you can see how hot your cpu is.. try to keep all cores below about 65-70 degrees max. then download a stress testing software (even tougher on your cpu than rendering) like “intel burn test” run this for a few hours, and if it doesnt crash, or get too hot, then increase the clock a bit and try again.
are you just changing the bclk in your bios or using some software that messes with settings for you? id avoid those as they tend to increase the voltage to your cpu much more than necessary, generating tons of extra heat. always do your overclocking in the bios if possible.
I found this article which is excactly the system as I have on this desktop computer i am testing it on.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/13hoqpzjkjlqcxr/intel-i7-3960x-ee-.pdf
And it says that the system is stable ewith 4.7 ghz. That is why I started there. (or actually i started at 4.8 ghz. because of a video from asus i saw)
But I don’t know which tempetures which is good, so thank you for this info.
I am adjusting the settings in asus bios.
I have adjustet the ghz so the tempature fits 65-70 degrees, but I had to go all the way down to 3.6 ghz to do this.
Do I then have to adjust some other settings to get higher ghz again. I have not adjustet voltage or anything else. it is 1.410
What cooling device do you use?
you can try dropping the voltage to say 1.35v and see if it still runs ok at 3.6, as this should drop the temperatures a lot. but if you set voltage too low it will crash.
the basic idea is to get the highest speed at the lowest voltage possible. this will give you as a result the highest speeds at the lowest temperatures.
key is to test well for an extended period if you dont want any nasty surprises.
another thing to realise is that not all chips overclock the same. its possible yours is just not a very good overclocker, although only 3.6 from 3.3 is very poor. id suggest another issue is causing this.
I have a corsair H60 cooler.
I have adjustet to 1.35 voltage and 3.8ghz and it stills run to hot. approx on 75 degrees..
Maybe I should go back to my original settings on this desktop computer.
That cooler should be able to get you up to a stable 4.3 ghz at the very least, with peaks not exceeding 75C. Dont know what’s wrong there…
Yes. But 75 degrees is easier to furfill but 65-70 that is way harder…
So what you say Franx, 75 degrees is also acceptable.?
My 3930 has been completely stable for the last 10 months at 4.5 ghz on a Noctua air cooler, lots of rendering done, peaking around 70-75C.
yes 75 degrees is also ok, although a bit hotter than i like.. i prfer to lose a couple of hundred mhz and keep things a bit cooler.
as franx says that cooler should be more effective than that. id suggest that its not mounted properly, thermal paste isnt applied well, or there is some other screwy setting in the bios, as at 1.35v and 3.8ghz id expect much lower temps.. unless you wanna get into remounting the cooler, or taking it up on one of the overclocking forums (overclockers.co.uk is a good one) id suggest you leave it be. do you know what temps the cpu was at on default settings? id guess pretty high too.
can i ask, what settings were you changing in the bios exactly..?
Hi Super Gnu
Sorry for my late reply.
I was following this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx2z07sFM2I
And setting the same settings as he did.
Which gtx would you recommend John?
I saw this video from renderstream.
I think I am going for a powerful maximus workstation instead of buying a big desktop computer and some render nodes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFUpPe3o1rE&feature=youtu.be
This looks absolutely amazing.. And fast… 
One thing to be cautious of is that vray RT doesn’t support everything that the normal vray renderer does, so while it’s very handy for previews and look dev, not everything you can render in vray will work in it right now.
I know. Forest Pro is one of the plugins I will be missing. But heard that is will be supported in the future, is it not true.?