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AMD® Phenom™ II Overclocking Thread

I think I am at my maximum overclock for my 955-C2 at 3.92GHz using 1.525v thanks to my silent upgrades. IMO the Noctua DH14 with Artic Silver 5 is the undisputed King of Coolers. I have ran Prime95 for 12 hours with a top temp of 52 degrees even while recording several TV programs as well. I did not know that this was possible.
After two years ownership, I am now apprehensive about upgrading this chip, this has NEVER happened to me in all my 10 years of computing building. My excitement about owning a 1090T is now Officially Luke Warm. I may hold off my bi-annual CPU upgrade and wait for AMD 4 to arrive and settle and upgrade in 2012, is this a good idea?


12HoursofPrime95at392Ghz0-01-2011.jpg

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Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-UD5P, 955 BE(C2)@ 3.92GHz 1.52V, Geil Value 4GB DDR3-1600,
ATI 5850 1GB, CM90 II Advanced, 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black, 4 HDDs, XFX 850W
Black Edition, Asus Xonar Essence STX, Pinnacle PCTV 3010iX Dual Analogue + DVB-T.
 
Brackish said:
Only gripe I have it that because its an unlocked dual to quad I get the odd crap out where the gpu fan spins up to max and a blank screen. When i restart it i have to re- save the oc settings in bios and turn it off and ton untill the motherboard sees that all 4 cores are active. Think I may see if a new bios is out but thats that only issue, oh and its infrequent. Can happen surfing the net or playing games.
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My unlocked duals did that due to inadequate vCore.

Edit:

I have a 2nd entry from the world of Athlon X2 unlocks for this thread. This time it's an Athlon X2 5200+ 45nm AM3 (cost £31) which became a Phenom FX-5200, now at 3.24GHz and CPU-NB / HT 2.26GHz and stuck in the blender for 24 hours:
Uriel said:
24 hour blend. That'll do, at least until I get onto messing with the CPU-NB overclock.

5341197732_4ff1b3d4f4_o.jpg
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Just decided to OC my 965BE C2 again. Went straight for my old settings. Upped the multi to give 3.8ghz, 1.55v. Only issue is, it's idling at 41C. Load went up to 59C on the core temp in about 1 minute of Prime95.

Now the only reason I needed 1.55v in the past was I had a pants Asus board with vdroop so bad that even at 1.55, it would drop to 1.485v. My new board is rock solid, so I'm going to experiment with dropping the voltage now.

The only thing that has changed since I used to overclock is that it now has a different motherboard, and sits with the intake about a foot from the radiator. Nothing I can do about that.

Sooo, worth bothering with reseating the cooler? The room is pretty warm for student digs and the vcore was pretty high, and I've never had issues with the temp before, so it should be seated fine.

EDIT: Gone for a slightly different approach. Pushing what I can get with stock volts. Trying 3.6ghz first.
 
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I've really fell in love with this X2 555BE that I picked up during the holidays:

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I wasn't really expecting it to successfully unlock I just bought it as a spare CPU that I could fall back on occasionally.

It did 3.6ghz as a quad on stock cooling/volts (1.275v), I was impressed by that so I hooked up my watercooling to see how far it would go. It overclocks pretty much the same as the 1055T 95W I had before it, except the CPU northbridge isn't quite as good (probably a Deneb/Thuban thing).

Not sure whether to get a Sandy Bridge as I had planned now or monitor the situation a while.
 
Muel said:
That's with 8gb of ram? How much for the CPU? :P
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Yeah 1600 mhz as well, I don't know if it's just these latest chips or the C3 stepping in particular but I once owned a 965BE right after release and it blew by comparison to this.

OCUK have taken a new batch of stock since I purchased this off them but wait and see if anyone reports success in the latest batch, it can't be a one off.
 
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I have a 965BE C2. On my old board it was fine with 4gb of RAM at 1600, now it needs to be at 1333 or it won't boot. I'm thinking 1100t at some point once bulldozer comes out. Hopefully the price should drop a fair bit.
 
1.55v does seem a bit excessive. Mind you I've found on my 965BE C2 that you can do 3.6ghz at 1.425v, 3.7ghz at 1.456v, but 3.8ghz needs 1.50v and above. Couldn't get 3.9ghz stable even at 1.55v.

I've settled on the 3.7ghz option.
 
Right guys, I've been thinking about rotating my cooler, at the moment it sits like this:

http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj207/ElMuelio/Antec 300 Mod/IMGP2330.jpg

As you can see, it's about 2.5" from my 5830, and is sucking all the hot air off the top of it. If I put my hand between them, I can feel the heat off it.

The reason I had it turned this way in the first place was because then it was feeding directly to the 140mm fan in the roof, but then I added the 5830, which is kicking out a lot more heat.

What do we reckon? Turn it so it's exausting towards the back of the case?

Also, anyone using a Titan Fenrir on AM3, can you confirm that you can actually mount it in all 4 positions? I can't remember.
 
LiamJ said:
I would recommend rotating 90 degrees, and placing a fan on the rear fan mount.
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That's what I thought, but do you know if this cooler can be rotated 90 degrees? The mounting plate looks like it might well not.

welshdragon said:
I have a 965 C3, what do you guys think the most I can do on stock volts would be? 3.6?
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I can get 3.6ghz on stock volts on my C2 (1.425v), I'm testing 3.7ghz at 1.456v now. You should be able to get 3.6ghz pretty easily, and possibly even 3.7ghz on stock volts.
 
Just built a new system with spec as follows:

AMD X2 555 Black Edition 3.2Ghz
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) 1600mhz
ATI Saphire HD 5770
ASUS M4A78LT-M-LE
Arctic cooling 500W PSU
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 CPU Cooler
Corsair F60 60GB SSD

Have had good success overclocking as a dual core but can't seem to unlock any additional cores, which doesn't bother me as i was aware that this was a possibility.

However i'm not convinced the CPU is to blame, could it be the MB? It has the "asus core unlocker" feature, (press 4 on startup) but this fails before windows can load. I also tried in the bios, using the unleashed mode and setting ACC to "per core" which actually displays core 2,3,4,5,6 is it normal to show more than 4 cores on what i'm aware is a quad core with 2 cores inactive?

I tried various combinations but couldn't even get it to load windows with any 1 additional core enabled which confused me, as surely i should at least be able to find the 1 core extra that IS being used by default?

I tried lowering my memory timings to 667 instead of 800 and still no change.

This is my first foray into overclocking so please forgive my ignorance! Any help, opinions welcome.
 
Uriel said:
It's not unusual to have to boost vCore or CPU-NB voltage to get unlocked cores stable. Have you tried that?
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I havn't as i had trouble locating where to change the settings for them in the bios :confused:

Can i get some software to adjust these values or do i just need to try a bit harder to loacte them in bios?
 
According to the Asus website the ASUS M4A78LT-M-LE only supports 95W CPU's, it does support some quads and hex cores but only the 95W variants.

X2 555BE is 80W at stock and probably closer to 125W unlocked, so it might be your motherboard?
 
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