1.) This guide is a general guide mostly based on Athlon 64's, overclocking is basically the same for the rest of the Athlon series.
2.) We cannot predict what your chip can do, it depends on quality of the core, the hardware and the cooling that you have.
3.) What temperatures are dangerous? Well for A64's, 60c load is the absolute most, my old 3000+ Clawhammer once spiked to 60c and I couldn't get past post and my BIOS said bad cpu temperature, etc.. 30-40c is normal idle for it, I've seen many 25c - 30c and personally if its any higher than that idle, get some airflow or better cooling!!!!
Its helpful to start off with decent hardware and cooling to overclock with, I don't mind threads being made on this as it changes a lot.
MainWell with all that said and done, and providing you have what you need heres the primary information to overclock your cpu:1. To start off with you need to get into the BIOS, this is where you control everything your computer does more or less. You do this usually by pressing the Del key when you've restarted / started up. Usually your prompted at start-up saying which key to press to get in.
2.
Turn off Cool n' Quiet and any cooling methods you have set in your BIOS such as this and Q'fan control.3. With the majority of s754 boards especially the ASUS dont have pci/agp locks so you cant go as far as you would like. The DFI s754 boards do i believe. All s939 boards do as far as i know. Set the AGP / pci locks at 33(pci)/66(agp). I have heard that when people have increased there CPU Frequency there agp has auto moved from 66 to a differnt number, so they set it to 67 and it stayed there.
4.
Go to the section which is named either Jumper free settings, advanced chipset features, or sometimes can be completely different, that's what I can remember.5. In that section there should be a bit called CPU Frequency that is set to 200Mhz. This is what you raise when you want to increase the clock speed of the CPU.
6.
I recommend raising this by 5Mhz at a time, this is infact about 50Mhz for the actual clock speed (to find out what it is for you times the CPU Frequency by the multiplier of the CPU.7. Exit and save, see if you can get into Windows, if so run a benchmarking program such as 3DMark03/05 or SiSoft Pro 2005. If the computer doesn't crash or you don't get any artefacts then you can class it as stable.
8.
Keep repeating processes 5-6 untill the computer crashes, you cant get into windows, doesn't go past post, or games randomly freeze. At this point you can play with the RAM timings and voltages.TimingsTo take your CPU further it helps to have RAM with the timings 2-2-2-5 or RAM that can take big voltages.
1. Go to Advanced options again; there should be some options to change your memory settings. If there isn't any try pressing ctrl + f1.
2.
Change the timings to 2.5-3-3-7 at the lowest if you have timings default at 2-2-2-5. If you don't have 2-2-2-5 or close you may as well stop reading this and go to the next section on upping the voltage3. When this is changed up the CPU Frequency bit by bit more like in steps 5-6
This should get you further as there is less strain on the RAM.
VoltageTo get the RAM & CPU further it's sometimes ok to raise the voltage on the chips. For RAM otherwise stated I wouldn't go over 2.7. I know my OCZ Platinum Rev2 can do 2.8 and it says on the OCZ site it can do 2.9, so check out what other people have been able to do. Also for the Athlon 64s I wouldn't go over 1.6 / 1.65v, My Clawhammer could do 1.7 on air, but I wouldn't advise anyone to do that.
RAMTo raise the voltages of the RAM it could be called RAM Voltage, DDR Voltage or vdimm, I haven't seen anything else yet. You should be able to set it to 2.6/2.7/2.8 or even higher on the DFI motherboards.
CPUTo raise the voltage of the CPU is could be called vcore or CPU voltage. It goes up by .025 so 1.4, 1.425, 1.45, 1.475, etc.. Like I said above don't go over 1.6/1.65 with the A64's unless you have proper cooling! But even then it can fry your chip.
HTSometimes the CPU can have to much strain on the HT so lower it from 5x (1000Mhz for s939) or 4x (800mhz for s754) to the step below (800Mhz for s939, 600Mhz for s754)
Credits for Mr. dave164 
PC WIZARD 2005 is a powerful utility designed especially for detection of hardware, but also some more analysis. It's able to identify a large scale of system components and supports the latest technologies and standards. This tool is periodically updated (usually once per month) in order to provide most accurate results. Besides, It can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, Cache performance, RAM performance, Hard Disk performance, CD/DVD-ROM performance, Removable/FLASH Media performance, Video performance, MP3 compression performance.
ClockGen: Make sure your get the version for your Chipset. This program allows you to Overclock from within windows. Not always as reliable as physically changing BIOS settings, but gives you an easy way to play with your settings without dozens of reboots.