Overclocking FX-8320

This is my first attempt at overclocking. Can someone briefly explain me what's the most efficient way of overclocking this particular CPU for the best single-threaded performance?

As a starting point, I enabled LLC to get rid of 0.1V vdroop and set manual voltage to the value to which vdroop dropped it under full load.

 

So, my questions are:

Do I raise bus frequency or multiplier? Or both?

If both, in which order?

In which increments do I increase bus, multiplier and voltage?

What temperatures should I be aiming at?

Is there any point in enabling turbo core and adjusting it?

How long should I stress test when adjusting multiplier, frequency and voltage? Is 10 minutes fine?

 

 

My motherboard is Asus M5A97 R2.0 and cooler is Hyper 212 Evo.

Right now I'm at 4GHz (200 MHz bus 20x multiplier) with 1.27 Vcore set in BIOS (OCCT shows 1.296V under stress).

Idle temperature is around 36 and under load it goes to 60.

Single channel 722 MHz DDR3? Is that correct or are you actually running dual channel 1333 MHz? The end answer to whether or not you should do bus speed or multiplier, is what kind of RAM you are running and are you overclocking your ram.

Pretty much the only way to get a high overclock with DDR 2400 MHz RAM is to raise the CPU/NB multiplier to run 2400 MHz RAM and raise the CPU multiplier Ive found.

If you are working with 1333 MHz Ram and are wanting to overclock the ram to 1600-1866 bus overclocking is the better choice.

Also stop using OCCT and Prime95 imediately. You are damaging your CPU when you load them up with those programs. Buy, torrent, I don't care how you get it, get AIDA64 and use it's built in Stability test.

you really don't want your load temp much higher than that

you might want to try asus's oc-genie just to get a reference point, but dont leave it at that (did you know an oc could reset back to default if load goes to high? yeah neither did i (reffering to asus's oc tool))

At the moment of taking this picture the second ram stick was in the wrong slot.

Right now it's dual channel 1600MHz which is stock. Speccy always shows half of what is set in BIOS for some reason that I can't be bothered to remember.

I'm not using any software made by Asus because it causes a lot of trouble.

60c is going to be your max temp's tbh mine thermal throttles at 62c 

Question stands then, are you wanting to overclock your RAM or do you just want the RAM to stay 1600 MHz? 

I'm fine with 1600, overclocking RAM won't get me any noticeable increase in performance.

OCCT and Prime95 hold back overclocks by creating heat overload in the CPU, AIDA64 will probably only net him 45-50*C with stock clocks.

I don't understand your dislike for Prime95 and OCCT. They just fully load CPU with calculations. Pretty much the same way, as converting video does (which gives same temperatures).

http://i.imgur.com/KKe09Ib.png

Also, am I reading the right temperatures? I use the CPU under Motherboard one because Package under CPU shows idle temperature lower than ambient in my room.

For example right now it shows 16 when it's at least 20 ambient.

cpu package should be around 60 max

cpu socket under motherboard shouldn't pass 70

What about package sensor showing 16 degrees idle? Or does it show the right temperature only when under load?

amd doesn't measure very well at idle, load should be fairly accurate though

mine is just below room temp at idle

HWiNFO64 is a better sensor package (you can allso use it to show anything in it in game on msi afterbuners server) http://www.hwinfo.com/download64.html

Thanks for the program but it shows exactly the same values as HWMonitor. Although in-game overlay is useful sometimes.

Incorrect. Prime95 and OCCT overload the CPU thermally. You will never see that kind of thermal load even if you wanted to use CPU rendering for editing. Never mind there are better options like OpenGL on AMD graphics cards or the laughable Cuda on Nvidia graphics cards. 

Also don't take anything anybody uses with a synthetic benchmark as written scripture because synthetic benchmarks are not even close to real world with video transcoding.