They were all out of stock of the Cooler Master Hyper 212 so I went with a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835214023 for 34.99 and brought my temps to about 29C/89F. Does that sound about right? Used Tuniq TX2 thermal paste.
Thanks I appreciate it.. Kinda new with overclocking.. Have any recommended guides? I know this mobo has some build in xboost feature.. wonder if I should try that.
Try the automatic OC and use those settings as a templete. Keep increasing by 50-100MHz until you're unstable (Prime95), then decide if you're happy. If not, increase voltage a little, until stable, then increase clock speed. Rinse. Repeat. Don't forget to minitor temps (I use CoreTemp)
I used a preset in the bios I had to 4.2ghz and moved up my gpu clock to 1000, also I set my ram to 1866 since that's what it goes up to. I tried moving up the CPU to 4.4ghz and the system rebooted, even tried moving up voltage. But so far so good on these settings.
4.4ghz on a apu would be verry impressive but with air cooling i would try to stay at 4.1-4.0 ghz just for the heat and voltage. no need to kill your apu for a small gain.
On stock cooling, yes 4.4GHz would be very impressive. On a Hyper 212, not really. The people at LegitReviews got 4.6GHz on Bulldozer's box cooler.
To get an extra 100-200 MHz out of processor is far from exciting, but we were being limited by the CPU cooler. With the CPU switched out to a larger and better design we were able to reach 4600MHz with full stability. This is a much nicer overclock. With a high-quality aftermarket air cooler or a water cooling solution you should be able to easily hit right around 5GHz with ease. We used a Corsair H100 water cooler and was able to hit 5GHz with stability on this processor. Putting a $100 CPU cooler on a $120 processor isn't something many will do, so we focused on air cooling today with factory CPU cooling solutions.
The APU has Piledriver modules, and they OC like crazy. Though, the GPU is going to take away from CPU OC headream. GPU is more important than CPU though.
You have plenty of thermal headroom left you want to keep going. Personally, I'd crank the CPU to 4.4 - 4.6GHz and see how far I can push the GPU engine.
If you're really concerned about temps, keep going until you're in the low 60's, and run Prime at least 12 hours to make sure you're stable. And remember, Prime puts a load you will likely won't see in the real world, even gaming, so you might not get those temps in real applications. That is why I say 70c is an ok limit; you're pretty unlikely to hit it.