Learning overclocking, strange occurrences

Hardware Hub Overclocking
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GA-990FXA-UD5 (rev 1)
FX-6300 (Be Quiet! Shadow Rock 2)
GTX 760 4gb (water cooled)
Viper Xtreme 8GB RAM
Thermaltake Toughpower 750 watt gold
Windows 7

NOTE: part of this thread is that I'm asking if there are any comprehensive sources that already exist that should be mentioned. For some reason, I'm not finding much with our search feature here. I'm unsure if I'm missing something obvious or... As I say below, I often use JayzTwoCents and others as a reference, but I know of no comprehensive, educational video where someone talks you through what everything in the BIOS is and WHY it matters to overclocking. I only see a ton of guides for various mobos and CPUs combinations. I've answered a lot of my own questions, but there's a lot I still don't know and I'm sure somebody else can use the info too. If anyone knows of comprehensive sources, please share them with your fellow noobs.

I've avoided overclocking for a long while now because of ignorance and fear of frying hardware I couldn't afford to replace. Many videos and articles later, along with aftermarket cooling, I'm trying to learn it now, even if I decide to not really do it. Any enthusiast should at least know.

MSI afterburner has given me some... mild FPS increases here and there, but stability hasn't been perfect. So for the time being, I'm just trying to learn CPU OCing. Today, I've OCed my 6300 to 4.0GHz using JayzTwoCents work as a reference so I don't forget anything. After some voltage changes, Prime95 is giving me a thumbs up. But Heaven benchmark is still acting very weird... You know how it's supposed to pan slowly and smoothly? It's been flying through the scenes like a bat out of hell. In game testing is still less than perfect, but better. Also, when I turn on or restart my computer now, it starts to turn on, seems to die, waits for a second, and then actually turns on (restarting isn't a smooth transition where the LEDs and fans stay on anymore either, it's an abrupt off, as if I had selected shut down, followed by that die and restart I just described). This is very similar to something that happened to me with a shoddy power supply in the past, but since I have that new (as in, yesterday) 750 watt gold PSU and it started immediately after OCing the CPU, I'm sure that's it. Also, even though I've turned Cool and Quiet, etc back on, variable voltage/clock speed regulation seems to not be working (no high temps though ,so..?). This is a minor point, but my smooth transition wallpaper slideshow turned into abrupt picture changes again after OCing.

This is a lot to read, but I wanted to describe the odd experiences that I, and I assume other people new to overclocking, have had. What should I/we do if these kind of things come up? Is there some source we can use for troubleshooting these obscure problems? Many thanks to anyone taking the time to read this. Send anybody having similar problems here if we have an answer.

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The powering up issue sounds like a power issue of some kind. Whether that be the power supply not supplying stable enough power on first boot to boot the overclock therefor the board shuts it down and tries again. or it could be how the motherboard applies the overclock. I don't really know amd stuff.

Doesn't that cpu auto over clock to 4.1GHz?

If it does did you turn off the uh amd equivalent of turbo boost?

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I'm fairly sure it's a power issue, I'm not sure of the nature of it. As I said, my PSU is a gold cert so I think it's a settings problem rather than hardware failure.

Yes, the single core turbo boost does. I did turn it off.

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My board has the updated BIOS; it's a UEFI now and a lot of what's in this video is different now.

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The restart at boot sounds a lot like if you alter some settings in the bios and then it the save and exit. it does that kinda insta dead then reboots. Perhaps your over clock is too high and the bios is rejecting it or lowering it? there are soo many things that could be wrong. it could just be an overclocking issue and you wont be able to overclock that pc. the chips are meant to run at the advertised speed anything beyond that is a chance.

What happens if you bring down the voltages and the overclock? like just bump it up 15Mhz over stock. does it still run fine? go another 15Mhz

I have not watched the video since im at work, but if you just tossed in the values he used it doesn't mean it will work for your CPU even though they are the same model.

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Yes, it's just like if you alter the BIOS, which will cause a "dead" restart. Only it does it at every restart now. As far as actually running that overclock, I've got to work and for it to be stable - other than those issues about some offline programs running at faster speeds than they are meant to. For example, Heaven flying through like I mentioned while my minimal FPS in Guild Wars 2 sees a good improvement.

I haven't tried a small increment increase to see the "breaking point" because the 6300 has seen some extreme overclocking, as much as 5Ghz for a few people. I only tried 4.0 and then 4.3. Interestingly, when I simply copied that 4.3 from one guide it was more stable than what I did at 4.0 (most likely a voltage compatibility thing). Oh, and as far as I know you can only increase/decrease in increments of 100. I'll have to play around with it today and see what I can do.

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I forgot to mention... I started looking up why I was having speed problems and came across an article talking about the northbridge speed having something to do with the data transfer with CPU/RAM/etc. So I went in and overclocked that at one point. Bad idea. At first I couldn't even get my comp to boot to BIOS and Windows did a "failed to start" screen. I immediately turned that back off since it was breaking even the boot process. I'm uncertain of what numbers I should be using at this point. Other people with almost the exact same hardware have not had this problem.

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ya I am not real sure on over clocking amd stuff so the 15 is probably not a correct number.

I don't think ill be able to help you hopefully someone else has some more ideas.

only thing i can suggest is to put everything back to default settings make sure that heaven doesn't act weird and then do a smaller over clock. then run heaven and see what it does. I find it odd that heaven is acting strange on a cpu over clock when it's mostly a vdieo test, exept for the parts that are run on cpu because of amd stuff.

if it is running faster in the cpu test this makes sense, as it is overclocked so it can run the test faster. now that being said it should just smooth out not speed up in playing, i think there is a speed setting in heaven im not sure maybe that has something to do with it?

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Update: the weird startups happen at just 3.8Ghz overclock with +.1v (may be too much on the voltage? I tried with just +.05 and got a problem). However, Unigine Heaven works at normal speed. I may test dungeon keeper 2 in a moment. This tells me that it is definitely caused by the overclock being too high, but the question is why that's happening at all and what settings would stop that.

The hardware monitors that showed FPS like Afterburner do not give false FPS readings at just 3.8 either.

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Hello there.
Have you checked if this double POST is perhaps a built-in function of the board? I've heard of some boards doing that when you have modified the BIOS settings. It's like they boot up at stock configuration, then notice the changes and restart to apply them. You could email Gigabyte about this, make sure to tell them which revision and BIOS version you are using as they may have fixed it at some point on newer models.
As for Heaven running too fast, this is something I have never witnessed anywhere else. I run a 4.9GHz 8350 myself without issues and have seen several heavily overclocked FX chips run without issues, so you should be able to clock it higher without this glitch. This is weird. I'll do some research if I have the time, hopefully I'll find an explanation to this.

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I'm told the double start is common with Gigabyte boards. And all other issues are fixed. See my new, closed threat "AMD CPU overclocking problems." Thanks for the reply though!