Ok guys,
I'm currently playing with OCing an FX-6300 rig on the board given in the subject (it has large heatsinks on the VRM and 6+2 power phase, seemed like a good choice given only one GPU is in use).
For cooling a Cooler Master TX3 is currently in use, it seems to be doing a decent enough job at this point (under Prime95 at stock clocks it is maxing at 34 degrees as opposed to maxing at 58 degrees on the stock cooler).
I have read numerous guides on overclocking Piledriver CPUs, which have been helpful to some extent, but I have one noob question they don't seem to address.
I understand with these CPUs that doing a small overclock (I'm only shooting for like 4Ghz or 4.2Ghz given the smallish cooler) is really only a matter of adjusting the multiplier and vcore. I understand this without any issue at all.
The trouble is that in the bios for this motherboard, if you switch the CPU and NB voltage section to manual from offset, you have a pile of values that need to either be entered or set to auto. One of them I know is the CPU voltage, another is the NB voltage etc. etc.
Should I just be chaning the vcore and leaving all the rest on auto? Or are there static settings for these too?
I also have disabled Cool'n'Quiet, C1E, C6, HPC and APM Master Mode as per various overclocking guides I have read. Any thoughts on this part also?
Since you're doing such a mild overclock, you should be able to just flip the multiplier while leaving everything else on auto/stock values.
Ah, I should have mentioned that I already tried that. I bumped the multiplier up with everything else left on auto and stress tested the machine for about an hour with Prime95. When I came back to the machine to check how it was going, there had been no errors on any of the cores but HWmonitor showed that a MASSIVE spike had occurred on vcore at some point = 2.5v!!!
I have since repeated stress tests on stock clocks and on a couple of TurboV overclock runs and haven't seen it happen again (vcore stays around 1.3v). I would prefer to do things manually than use TurboV though as the ASUS software always underclocks my RAM to 1400Mhz for some crazy reason (I have 1866).
If I can figure out how to do everything manually properly I'm pretty sure it will be stable. TurboV got my machine to 4.1Ghz and that was stable for six hours in Prime95 (had to go to work, so I stopped it at that point) and temps never got over 42 degrees.
I just leave all the other voltages on auto and bump up the Vcore. but there are some other tweaks you can do to keep cool.
first- load line calibration- turn it on. it lets your Vcore dynamically adjust. this'll help thermals
second- EPU: enabled but leave it in 'auto' mode, this will let your multiplier dynamically adjust. also helps thermals
third- use offset voltage, its more forgiving.
and in closing, don't stop at such a low clock, push it to the wall. its fun as heck to hit the limits of your system. I'm at 4.2ghz on a phenom II X4 965BE, same kinda board as you. and while the path to victory was littered with BSOD's and crashes- it was worth it.
Cheers Signal,
I'll take your advice and do some tweaking.
What I have managed so far after reading a few more forums is 4Ghz on a manual vcore of 1.3. Prime95 showed no errors or warnings after six hours. Been gaming on it all day without issue and the CPU doesn't get to 47 degrees more or less 60.