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AMD® Phenom™ II Overclocking Thread

I've decided to aim for a 220 fsb first, giving me a 3.74ghz CPU, 1465mhz ram, and a 2200mhz NB.

If that is stable I'll carry on and head for 230, maybe even 240.
 
Ha! You guys with Black Editions don't know you're born!

I get to about 286 (assuming everthing else is at or below stock) before I even start to need increasing chipset or RAM voltages over stock. Still, every motherboard is different.
 
VinceB1 said:
good stuff, so where am I likely to find the most performance with this chip? Should i clock the bus, ht or multi? or find the max fsb and ht then adjust the multi for the best possible clock speed?
Click to expand...

Don't really need to touch HT or FSB, just use the multi to take it up.

Once you have your max core clock start working on your CPU-NB.


My 1090T would do 2600MHz on the CPU-NB on stock volts (as a rough indicator), and would go all the way up to 3GHz if you needed it. :)

I'd aim for a solid 4GHz core clock, and a 2800 CPU-NB. It'll fly.
 
Right guys, help? :D

Earlier I was stress testing with Prime95 with a 220fsb. I set this to give a 3.5ghz CPU, 1466mhz RAM, 1980 HTLINK and 1980 North Bridge. It failed after 15mins. I'm assuming therefore that my RAM is the issue. It's unstable going from 1333mhz at 1.5v to 1466mhz at 1.65v. I'm gonna add another 2 DIMMS soon anyway so it'll never be stable past 1333mhz I reckon. Still, I'm up for clocking the NB/NB-CPU/HTLINK on the multi.

I seem to remember that pushing the HTLink too high can burn the board?

What should I aim for on the north bridge?
 
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RAM voltage is a possibility. That tends to give me no POST for me, rather than Prime Errors.

Your northbridge is clocked too low to support that RAM speed by the way. Remember - 3x single data rate equivalent. (1466/2)x3=2199 so you'll probably need 2.2GHz on the CPU-NB to support that RAM speed stably on a C2.
 
Hmmmm you could be right. I'm just gonna stick at 1333mhz, then when I add another pair of dimms I have the voltage headroom if it needs it. I remember seeing a Phenom II write-up that showed that going from 1333mhz to 1600mhz made such a tiny difference that it wasn't really worth bothering with. This way I can OC the NB on the multi.

What about HTLink though? I've overclocked it on my old board, and I got some increase in Superpi 1m, but now I value gaming/graphics benchmarks far more highly. (DiRT2, Crysis, Unigine Heaven/Tropics etc).

I need to learn more. No idea what the NB and NB-CPU actually are or do. :P
 
Muel said:
What about HTLink though?...

No idea what the NB and NB-CPU actually are or do...
Click to expand...

HT link covers direct access to system RAM from PCI-E, amongst other things. Overclocking it may raise minimum frames when your graphics card has to deal with a framebuffer greater than its onboard vRAM. I think this situation is relatively rare though and even with an overclock it will be to much of a dip for most people. I would generally still want to turn down settings, AA or resolution to avoid the situation.

The CPU-NB is the on-die memory controller and l3 cache. You can get significant increases in gaming (and general) performance from overclocking it. The difference can be so big, I'm surprised that AMD haven't released chips with CPU-NB stock clocks higher and charged more for them. Some gaming tests from CPU-NB overclocks: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/phenom-2-720-810-overclocking-p2.html. It seems the more cache your CPU has, the more benefit gained.

NB is your motherboard's chipset.

I suggest you give this a good read: http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_Dragon_AM3_AM2_Performance_Tuning_Guide.pdf
 
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Guide doesn't seem to be working for me, seen it before though, will try it again later, thanks. :)

Just upped the CPU-NB to 2600mhz at 1.350v, (seemed liked a common figure on the forums I looked at), would it be worth pushing further? What's the max CPU-NB voltage?

Couple more questions that I can't find an answer to:

What's CPU PLL voltage for?

What's the NB/PCIe/PLL voltage?

I've found some stuff that mentions these, but nothing that explains it particularly well.

EDIT: Manual states that the CPU NB voltage can be set to 1.35-1.5v when overclocking, so I'm going for 2800mhz at 1.475v. Temps are up from 52C load to 55C load, worth it though for an extra 800mhz on the CPU NB! ill bench later and post my results. :)
 
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Uriel said:
Sorry - posted the link from my phone and some weird android stuff got added. Have fixed it now.
Click to expand...

I googled it and found it. :)

After another few hours of fiddling, I'll shorten and edit this post. Slowly getting to a point where everything is maxed out. Now running the CPU at [email protected], the CPU-NB at [email protected], GPUs both at 900/1125 up from 825/1050. CPU-NB is still unstable, looks like it's going to need the full 1.5v that AMD say it can have to get 2800mhz stable.

Still no idea what the PLL voltage does after over an hours searching.
 
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Right I've chosen my clocks now, 24/7 is CPU 3.7ghz @ 1.475v, CPU NB 2600mhz @ 1.4v, GPUs at 875/1100.

For benching it's CPU 3.8ghz @ 1.525v, CPU NB 2800mhz @ 1.5v, GPUs 900/1125.

Is there anything else I could overclock to see an improvement? Crysis was at 40.4fps at 3.7ghz with 2000mhz CPU NB and stock GPUs, with an extra 100mhz on the CPU, 800mhz on the CPU NB and 75mhz on the GPUs and graphics memory, it went up to 40.7fps. I thought that lot would give more than 0.3fps? With the same changes DiRT2 went from 67.1fps to 73.5, which is a 6.4fps increase.

EDIT: Anyone know how to OC the Northbridge on the 890GPA-UD3H? There's no option for upping the multi so I guess it means using the FSB?
 
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Muel said:
Right I've chosen my clocks now, 24/7 is CPU 3.7ghz @ 1.475v, CPU NB 2600mhz @ 1.4v, GPUs at 875/1100.

For benching it's CPU 3.8ghz @ 1.525v, CPU NB 2800mhz @ 1.5v, GPUs 900/1125.

Is there anything else I could overclock to see an improvement? Crysis was at 40.4fps at 3.7ghz with 2000mhz CPU NB and stock GPUs, with an extra 100mhz on the CPU, 800mhz on the CPU NB and 75mhz on the GPUs and graphics memory, it went up to 40.7fps. I thought that lot would give more than 0.3fps? With the same changes DiRT2 went from 67.1fps to 73.5, which is a 6.4fps increase.

EDIT: Anyone know how to OC the Northbridge on the 890GPA-UD3H? There's no option for upping the multi so I guess it means using the FSB?
Click to expand...

Ahh this is the same board as ive just got... love it so far and it happily lets my x6 sit at 4ghz, but does have an option for multi on my chip. happy days XD
 
HI thought I would add to the post...

Stock my rig is Phenon II x 2 560 @ 3.3ghz
Crucial Ballistix 10666 @ 1333mhz
ASUS Crosshair III

Got my OC stable like this so far...

Phenon II unlocked to x4 560 @ 3.75ghz
Crucial Ballistix 10666 @ 1609mhz
HT @ 2144mhz
NB Frequency @ 2416mhz

This is with a FSB of 302,hz and multiplyer of 12.5

Heres a photo 45mins into OCCT...

444810708_o.jpg
 
Any suggestions to improve this? My ram appears to be running underclocked, which I don't think is a huge issue?

B0.png

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CPUZ1.png
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CPUZ3.png


Temps are around 28 idle, and late 38-41 load. This has been primed for 8 hours, etc and has been running stable for over 2 months so I know it's fine at these settings.
 
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