Stuttering especially while in town.

[Coldfire]

Eh I don't think overclocking causes this kind of problem unless your hardware is severely broken. That your stuttering was gone is probably 'cause there was just less players.

[Jovy]

I tested it a few times and overclocking the pciex bus was the culprit for me. i was testing it while mining and walking through the different mining points at camp iron lake. All i can say is test it and if works for you guys great, and if not you're no better off then u was before.

[origamikitsune]

Overclocking can cause that sort of problem. In short, the more you overclock anything, the more you loose data. The more you loose data, the more you have to reprocess it. In game like FF14 that is inefficiently written, that can mean slower response rather than faster, despite the OC. Understand that things are rated at the speeds they are rated at usually because of (normal and expected) manufacturing flaws. OCing causes those flaws to stand out a little more. In most cases (most not all) this can be mitigated by keeping the OC'd things colder, but not always.

[Coldfire]

If your OC causes you to lose data, your system will BSOD or at least cause application crashes. That happens if people OC without increasing the voltage accordingly or cooling the system sufficiently. Besides the PCIe bus isn't supposed to be OCed anymore these days. It's actually a part you should definately not OC in the times of non-gpu PCIe devices :P
For this game I would actually recommend to underclock the GPU, 'cause it puts alot of stress on the gpu (more than any other game). This also solves crash-issues for some cards.

[origamikitsune]

I will amend what you said and add that it will /usually/ cause you to BSOD, but not always. But yes, you are right. In this game, mitigating processor usage is important. Its one of the reason so many people recommend that you set your General Draw Quality to 8. I mean seriously, 10degrees C drop changing that from 10 to 8?

You know, sometimes I wish the dev's would just post and say, "How do we fix this alt-tab thing?" They would get so many friggin' code snippets is insane. But, gone are the days when hacking was a good thing and meant "throwing together something that works." Er... wait, its called the Open Source Movement. Either way, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Even sadder, being thoroughly addicted to a game in which the best practice is to upgrade to Hardware that has no other use except to make this game run.

[Jovy]

Agreed with what was said but even new Mbs' i have a classified from evga and it allows u to oc the pcie bus. Some people recommend it for stability. Nonetheless its all good and if this helps just one person then i'm happy for for it.

[Loth]

Agreed with what was said but even new Mbs' i have a classified from evga and it allows u to oc the pcie bus. Some people recommend it for stability. Nonetheless its all good and if this helps just one person then i'm happy for for it.

Overclocking 101 is to run your PCIe bus at 100.

With the release of Sandy Bridge, overclocking has change a bit (and become way easier).
You no longer overclock by raising BCLK, or rather, you should keep BCLK at 100 as it is tied in to SATA, PCIe, memory, USB.
But a bit extra can be had by raising the BCLK, though you will not be able to raise it by much as it affect so many other things than just CPU speed, and even a slight increase may render other parts of your computer unstable.