So with this being my first overclock ever, Please do bare with my ignorance of this. Now let me jump right into it.
So i want to learn how to overclock my CPU to something a little faster, But not to the point where i have to be worried all the time about temps. I'll list whats on my RIG.
-AMD Athlon II X4 635 (2.90Ghz)
-12.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 (553MHz) (One Gskill Ripjaws 8Gb) And a random 4Gb that i had laying around.
-ASRock 960GM-VGS3 FX
- XFX Radeon R7770 Ultra OC core edition.
With all the technical stuff out of the way, I'm going to be honest i don't know where to start with this, With this being my only CPU i don't want to wreak it, because I can't afford a new one.
However with my MotherBoard it comes with its own easy overclocking tool, which i tried (Bumped it up to 3045MHz) And so far it seems to be running stable but, I don't see any noticeable differences in performance. So I thought about bumping it even high to at least to 3300MHz But i don't trust that clock speed. I am running the stock cooler for my Cpu. I know the Temp cutoff for my CPU is somewhere around 55°C so that seems to be the starting point for me.
Just encase you need temperatures of my computer to help the CPU is about 30°C(28°C) underload, and my MB is about 40°C(38°C) im going to be honest im not sure it that's alot.
Thanks in advanced for any advice and help you guys can give me.
The highest its gotten using prime95, is 45C at first i thought i wasn't reading it right. But no the highest its gotten to is 45C
And the lowest I've seen it idle was 15C during the night, and during the day its about 20C. I'll see if i can take screenshots for you.
And im going to be honest i ran Prime95, and my CPU was 100% usage, but it didn't feel sluggish at all, felt like it normally did, however i didn't try to run anything, just in case. I feel like im either reading it wrong or somethings not right, because the temps seem too good to be true.
Having overclocked an Athlon II 630 successfully to 3600 MHz I will try to help.
1)On the Athlon II series CPUs you should be trying to keep the temps below 65 degrees celcius
2) The core voltage should not go above 1.425V if you are on the stock cooler (I believe this is .075V over stock but not exactly sure).
3) the stock cooler will probably not allow more than 3300MHz and this would be simple to achieve in most BIOS:
There should be a FSB (Front Side bus) setting in the BIOS the default setting for AMD CPUs is 200.
===> Raise this number to 220 (this is equal to a 10% overclock) save your settings and restart. After this you should check you system for stability. Some people use OCCT or AIDA 64 programs which are essentially worst case scenario at least for temperatures, but sometimes the real test is gaming with your overclock for an extended period of time because that is what most people need the extra performance for.
If you use AIDA64 or OCCT programs you should let them run for at least 8-12 hours to check for stability.
If you have stability errors but the CPU stays under 65C try going back into the BIOS and raising your CPU vcore a little bit at a time and retry the previous steps to check for stability.