AMD® Phenom™ II Overclocking Thread

Cookeh · 30 Jan 2012 at 16:16

Alkalinepro5 said:
I can hit 4.0ghz on stock, but try and run something like BF3 and it will take a dump all over your screen.

Perfectly stable in gaming for the 4 months I had it before I tried hitting 4.2GHz+ and overclocking CPU-NB speed.

Armadillo · 30 Jan 2012 at 19:42

HeX said:
Yup CPU-NB is the one you want to bump up.

I'll give it a raise later then, and try 1.47 with the raised cpu-nb and let it run for 12 hours or so just to make sure it's stable rather than just getting lucky.

Thanks for the help.

Spenty · 30 Jan 2012 at 19:42

I'm at 1.5v for 4.1ghz, can do 4.2 in games and stuff but prime always reports a core stops working after a few minutes but never had BSOD. Over 3.9-4ghz usually requires a large voltage bump on most chips. Depends on ram and board though.

Revolution · 30 Jan 2012 at 22:23

My effort...

Not played with much as you can see, yet to get my XMS memory upto the OC rating of [email protected] and sort out the various other settings to tinker with.

During..

Finished..

Anything else that I should do ???

Revo.

Armadillo · 31 Jan 2012 at 14:20

Bumped cpu-nb up a little and system still BSOD and rebooted 8 hours into prime

, so near enough same time as last. Cpu-nb was 1.000V at stock and I bumped a little to 1.0250, not enough? Need little bit more? Wasn't sure how high to try.

Vcore bump again, next offset I can go to would be 1.488, so still within limits but getting close to 1.5 and pretty much last shot as the next offset will go to 1.5 (offset go up 0.006, but it takes two to make change to voltage so 0.012, I assume because of voltage drop).

Something else to change? I do see some places saying to have memory at 2T, not 1, but I believe that is if the memory is also overclocked, not when you are just doing cpu by multiplier.

Also don't know if it helps, but the blue screen prime causes is always hal.dll+12a3b and ntoskrnl.exe+18d513.

HeX · 31 Jan 2012 at 14:32

@Armadillo - I'm pretty sure that CPU-NB should be 1.2V at stock...

Revolution said:
Anything else that I should do ???

Revo.

Start working your CPU-NB speed up, at 4GHz you want to get your CPU-NB up to ~2.6-2.8GHz for best performance. Though with 16GB you might have to settle for 2.4-2.6GHz

Spenty · 31 Jan 2012 at 14:32

Set your northbridge to 2600mhz and you'll want at least 1.25-1.30v on the cpu-nb. After failing 8 hours into prime I can't see it being a problem for normal gaming use.

Armadillo · 31 Jan 2012 at 15:34

HeX said:
@Armadillo - I'm pretty sure that CPU-NB should be 1.2V at stock...

Hmm, wonder why it's been set so low then. Quick search does seem to suggest that default is around that, only post I can find where it was 1V, was another sabertooth owner.

Spenty said:
Set your northbridge to 2600mhz and you'll want at least 1.25-1.30v on the cpu-nb. After failing 8 hours into prime I can't see it being a problem for normal gaming use.

I'd like it as stable as I can get it, as I sometimes do some encoding overnight and wouldn't like it to crash half way through or something. Increasing nb speed, is that to try and help with stablity? or just performance gains. As I know increasing it is a nice performance boost, but if that's all it is, for now I will leave. Increase nb to 1.2, leave at stock and try again. Would like to just get 3.8 stable first at lowest voltage I can, then once that's done, I'll work on the nb

.

HeX · 31 Jan 2012 at 15:41

Higher NB speed is just for performance gains.

For now get your chip solid. I'd certainly set your CPU-NB to 1.2V and retest. Not sure why yours is set so low by default :confused:

Spenty · 31 Jan 2012 at 15:53

If your not bothered about performance gains and just stability why overclock the CPU then? Northbridge at 2600mhz will be perfectly stable if you set the CPU/NB voltage to 1.25v and no this isn't a high voltage, mine has been stable at this for over a year now. Increasing the northbridge speed can actually make a CPU overclock more beneficial/stable.

Winnter · 1 Feb 2012 at 13:35

hi i don't know if anybody can help but here goes,
6 months ago i overclocked my phenom 965 (RB-C3) and managed to get 3.8ghz with X19 multiplier,but when i try and change it to x20 it drops down to X5 so i cant get past X19 for some reason.does anybody have any ideas?
as i want to try and get to 4.0ghz if i can,im using gigabyte GA-M720-US3 for my motherboard.
thanks

Armadillo · 1 Feb 2012 at 13:40

Spenty said:
If your not bothered about performance gains and just stability why overclock the CPU then? Northbridge at 2600mhz will be perfectly stable if you set the CPU/NB voltage to 1.25v and no this isn't a high voltage, mine has been stable at this for over a year now. Increasing the northbridge speed can actually make a CPU overclock more beneficial/stable.

I want both, stability and the performance. I just want to get one thing at a time sorted. Get it stable first, then I'll adjust the nb speed

.

Anyway, it fell over again at around 8 hours even with nb set to 1.2

. Only difference is bluescreen veiwer doesn't hightlight any files as the cause, but the bug check code is still the same

. Suppose I'll have to try 1.488 vcore, getting annoying now, everyone else [email protected] or lower, yet mine refuses to work even at 1.47

.

Armadillo · 2 Feb 2012 at 13:38

Success. 1.488V and prime stable overnight for 12hours

.

Not sure why mine seems to need so much to be stable. Always kept temps in check, Linx stable at 1.4V, but not prime, it's definitely a c3 as well. I suppose it doesn't really matter, temps are fine even with 1.488 and still under 1.5V, just seems a bit odd.

Will take a break from it now and work on the nb speed next week I think.

HeX · 2 Feb 2012 at 13:44

Luck of the draw, but still well within safe voltage. Glad you finally got it sorted

Spenty · 3 Feb 2012 at 16:51

Just don't go above 1.5v on air

Jayster · 3 Feb 2012 at 17:40

Armadillo said:
Success. 1.488V and prime stable overnight for 12hours .

Not sure why mine seems to need so much to be stable. Always kept temps in check, Linx stable at 1.4V, but not prime, it's definitely a c3 as well. I suppose it doesn't really matter, temps are fine even with 1.488 and still under 1.5V, just seems a bit odd.

Will take a break from it now and work on the nb speed next week I think.

My chip is not the best with those slightly lower voltages and clocks but it sits perfectly stable at 4.2 with 1.5v. Really though its just luck.

Spenty said:
Just don't go above 1.5v on air

As long as its a good air cooler and can keep the temps down then going above 1.5v is fine. Although really there shouldn't be any need to have to go above 1.5v.

PavilionGB · 4 Feb 2012 at 09:26

Hello guys,
After having owned my system for just over 3yrs ... i decided late enough to look on overclocking it ...
I had managed in the past to unlock a previous PhenomII x2 550 BE 3.1GHz to 4 cores .... but this one I have now .... what ever happens it will not move from the two cores.

My configuration at the moment is :
M/B ASRock M3A790GMH128M
CPU AMD Phenom II x2 550 3.1GHz Black Edition
RAM 6GB 1333MHz DDR3
Graphics Asus HD6770 EAH6770/2DI/1GD5
1TB Hitachi SATA II HDD
750GB Maxtor SATA II HDD
250GB Seagate SATA II HDD
320GB Samsung EIDE HDD
1TB WD MyBook connected on FireWire
DVDRW EIDE
700W PSU

and my overclocking setttings are:

ACC is off and only works on the standard 2 cores
Voltage : 1.375V
Core Mult : 17.50x
NB Multiplier 11.00x
HT Ref. Clock : 211.00 MHz
PCI Express : 105

That brings the processor to 3.693MHz
and temps around 32C for CPU
and around 38C for GPU

I have not touched yet the GPU ... as the Asus software will not load keeps saying there is no Asus card installed??? The fault might be I installed the latest driver from the Asus website and might not like it... lol

nuttyprot · 4 Feb 2012 at 15:05

Winnter said:
hi i don't know if anybody can help but here goes,
6 months ago i overclocked my phenom 965 (RB-C3) and managed to get 3.8ghz with X19 multiplier,but when i try and change it to x20 it drops down to X5 so i cant get past X19 for some reason.does anybody have any ideas?
as i want to try and get to 4.0ghz if i can,im using gigabyte GA-M720-US3 for my motherboard.
thanks

its a fault in the board, basicly need new bios I have the same board been tracking down the bios for over 8 months now not found them.

Some1 with the same problem
http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php?topic=3876.0

As you can see at the bottom of the thread problem was solved and the file i need is m720us3.f7p ( 1024 KB ) .

Contacted Giga constantly never got back to me.

Will keep a close eye on the thread some1 maybe able to help

Winnter · 16 Feb 2012 at 20:00

nuttyprot said:
its a fault in the board, basicly need new bios I have the same board been tracking down the bios for over 8 months now not found them.

Some1 with the same problem
http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php?topic=3876.0

As you can see at the bottom of the thread problem was solved and the file i need is m720us3.f7p ( 1024 KB ) .

Contacted Giga constantly never got back to me.

Will keep a close eye on the thread some1 maybe able to help

thanks nuttyprot for that

i contacted gigabyte and it had taken them 1 week to send me the file i needed( F7P) which now works,i tryed to overclock it to 4.2ghz with 1.45v core
it's fine in skyrim with the nexus texture mod,but when i tryed battlefield 3 it gave me a blue screen after 2mins,so i have to stay at 4.0ghz.
once again thanks nuttyprot

Cooper · 17 Feb 2012 at 15:44

Winnter said:
thanks nuttyprot for that
i contacted gigabyte and it had taken them 1 week to send me the file i needed( F7P) which now works,i tryed to overclock it to 4.2ghz with 1.45v core
it's fine in skyrim with the nexus texture mod,but when i tryed battlefield 3 it gave me a blue screen after 2mins,so i have to stay at 4.0ghz.
once again thanks nuttyprot

Any chance you can upload it to Mediafire or similar to share , as i have the same Mobo, using the F7n Bios with the same problem?.