overclocking Help me overclock my Phenom II X4 945

[AMDGrill]

Greetings

As title says, I want to overclock my Phenom II X4 945 to its capable limits, on an Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 motherboard.

Now, I am not exactly a stranger to overclocking, but as it goes with anything, my knowledge is fairly outdated, my only practice was with a DRD (I believe it's a failed transition between DDR and DDR2) System running a Pentium 4 when I got my new rig at 2005, housing an Athlon II X2 so I thought I could have fun with my old system.

My system specs is as followed:
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard 
AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHZ 6MB Processor + ThermalTake NiC F4 Cooler
3x4=12GB GSkill Ripjaws 1866Mhz DDR3 Dual Channel RAM
ThermalTake SmartPower 80+ Bronze 550W PSU 
WD C. Blue 64mb 1TB HDD
WD C. Blue 16mb 500GB HDD
Dark Raiden ATX Case ( A Local brand case, installed 5x Asiahorse Solar Eclipse fans - 2x on Front, 2x at the top and 1x at Rear, has a 14cm Side intake currently vacant)

Asus Nvidia Gt630 - Looking for a card to upgrade it currently, most likely will be a GTX770 or GTX960

Now, you may say, holy god you have a horrible graphics card, your system is already bottlenecked even tho your CPU is lackluster aswell, and you'ld be right, but the reason why I want to overclock is because I need more processing power/speed for playing strategy games against CPU controlled players and more importantly, for fun.

 

I play lots of strategy games for intensive hours against multiple CPU-controlled enemies, which results in massive stuttering, even in Age of Empires III when I go against 6 or more CPU-opponents.

I am currently using a Thermaltake NiC F3 cooler and running the CPU @3.7GHz, the clocks are as follows:

Spoiler

Clocks.BMP

Voltages are

Spoiler

Voltages.BMP

Now, what got me struggling is my numerious BIOS settings that I'm not exactly familiar with. 

I have way too many settings such as VDDA voltage, ND voltage, NB HT, NB 1.8 etc. And I need some guidance with these voltages and settings.
Should I change CPU/NB Frequency? Should I change HT Link Speed? Does leaving Voltage on Auto means it will draw more power when needed, or does it just mean default at all times?
Am I doing right with the Offset clocking, am I giving too much voltage?

I have tried running Prime95 Blend Test on all 4 cores for about an hour, so far it didnt crash but the temperatures get a bit scary, around 75 Degrees Celcius, but I have seen 98 Degrees Celcius with this system during gaming(AoE III, against 11 CPU-Experts), gave me a CPU Overheat warning and turned itself off, but survived, that was with my old case and old cooler at default clocks.

 

My Idle temps and voltages are as follows:
 

Spoiler

Can you guide me through what settings to enable / disable when overclocking and what else to do to get optimum performance increase altogether?

[SirWendall]

@AMDGrill It'll be hard for you to get an overclock cause of the mobo. I've had that one before. It only has a 4 pin CPU header

[AMDGrill]

Yeah, noticed the lacking parts of this mobo lately, no heatsink on transistors and only 4-pin cpu header and no USB 3.0 header etc. But given how my CPU draws 95W at default and 98W at current 3.7Ghz, it should be fine, right?
 

[Morgan MLGman]

47 minutes ago, AMDGrill said:

Looking for a card to upgrade it currently, most likely will be a GTX770 or GTX960

 

Just a FYI: R9 380 costs the same as both of those cards and performs better

[AMDGrill]

39 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

 

Just a FYI: R9 380 costs the same as both of those cards and performs better

Aware of that sadly, but given that I'm looking for a used one and R9 is fairly new compared to the market in here, it costs 50% more compared to those 2 

[Morgan MLGman]

1 minute ago, AMDGrill said:

Aware of that sadly, but given that I'm looking for a used one and R9 is fairly new compared to the market in here, it costs 50% more compared to those 2 

R9 280X is also faster, maybe those are cheaper?

[AMDGrill]

43 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

R9 280X is also faster, maybe those are cheaper?

They are fairly the same price, worthwhile you may want o check this thread of mine

Now, I have just finished Prime95 Benchmarking without a crash, It went all the way up to 90 Degrees Celcius during 8192k FFT on 4 CPUs and 4 Workers, 

A line of the results were as follows:
Timings for 8192K FFT length (4 cpus, 4 workers): 213.41, 188.45, 205.37, 257.02 ms.  Throughput: 18.75 iter/sec.

Not sure if these numbers are good or anything, but does it mean my overclocking is stable?

[Morgan MLGman]

For how long did the P95 test run? BTW. those temps are a little too high imo. Check whether your clock speeds drop during stresstesting (not instantly but when the mobo and CPU heat up), the VRMs might make the CPU throttle to prevent overheating.

[AMDGrill]

I saw CPU frequency on some cores drop down to 987~mhz and Wattage to 26W during 4-cpu testing period, the Benchmark took about 10 minutes to finish, forgot to add, the Core temperatures went down to 68 or so in 3 or so seconds as soon as the 4-core testing finished and went down to 1-core testing and went from there