first ever overclock for me

pickledorange

pickledorange

pickledorange

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ok so heres my build

Gigabyte GA-M720-US3
AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 940 Black Edition 3.0GHz
OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
650W PSU

the graphics card is yet to be upgraded so that will be done next month.

im not too sure what can be overclocked to what level but i had it clocked up to about 3.55Ghz ratio was at 17.5 and frequency was at 205 (but only registered as 203)

now it started off running fine but as i had more stuff running it decided to shut down.

i dropped the frequency back to 20 so now im clocked at 3.5ghz and i shut down again but took longer.

im NOW running at 17x ratio and 200ghz frequency and i think im stable at 3.4ghz

is there any way to improve my clock without the machine shutting down?

my cpu temp seems to be a stable 50deg or lower

any other info ill try to get if you let me know what you need :)
 
Use a more reliable stress testing method, like on of these programs -
Intel Burn Test
Prime95
LinPack
OCCT

Run them for 10 minutes or so as you are upping the FSB, if the system appears to become unstable under the overclock try giving the CPU a bit more voltage (careful though, most people dont like going over 1.35V).
Your northbridge and memory voltage can effect stability too.

Im not an experienced overclocker either so double check what I say before you take action on it lol.
 
the main reason i dropped the FSB (thats the 200 part right?) back to 200 when it shut down is that i wasnt doing a stress test as such and it still cut out i got worried so went back a few steps

im happy with a 3.0 to 3.4 clock even though ive not noticed much difference, but id still like to get more if i can :)
 
The latest AMD CPU's dont overclock anywhere near as much as the Intels so dont think "he's got his 3GHz E8400 over 4GHz so I should be able to do that with my AMD 940"

Pretty much all of what BIGBC said is sound advice. Stress test using somthing like Intel Burn Test or Prime95 after each change you make. I personally do 5 loops of IBT as its much faster to find errors than Prime.

You really need to start from the begining though. Need to up the fsb slowly, testing after each change and when it becomes unstable, take the Vcore up a notch. I dont like going over 1.45V on my E8400, but not sure about voltages in an AMD CPU, not used one for years! See if you can find any reviews for your CPU, they often overclock them as part of the review and that will give a rough idea of what you can aim for :)
 
now i used IBT and it was running stable.
i upped the ratio from 17 to 17.5 and thats testing now @3.5 :)

i found a review that said they had it stable at 3.7 with the ratio at 18.5. my pc crashes and shuts down at that value is that due to the Vcore?

and am i supposed to have no programs running when i do the IBT?

sorry for being such a newbie :)
 
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ok im slightly confused by something else now.

i set the fsb to 204 and the vcore to +0.1 yet the values on core temp have not changed since the 203 setting any idea why? if i reboot and go into bios they are still the same but they dont change on core temp

coretemp.png
 
What about in CPU-Z? Thats a better program for seeing your CPU settings. Ive got an folder with about 20 different programs in for testing and monitoring my PC when overclocking haha, all do different things better than others.

If its crashing it could well be because the Vcore needs raising, but if you already have it at 1.45 I wouldnt take it much higher!! Like I said though, need to get sombody who uses AMD processors though to clarify what a safe voltage is for your chip
 
i found all this on another website, looks quite helpful but what do they mean by 'not lasting long' is that where it blue screens because you clock to far and you have to go back down a step?

Overclocking said:
As our faithful Asus M3A79-T died just before the festive period we were left having to use the AMD provided MSI 790GX for this review as it was the only other one we have with a Phenom II BIOS at this time. Unfortunately, its BIOS is pretty weak and it's not a great overclocker.

After a little play and some frustration we managed to get 3.7GHz out of it at 1.488V, but it didn't last long, and we eventually settled for 3.5GHz through multiplier overclocking only (17.5x) with a -2 percent ACC correction on all cores at the same voltage. At this, we found it was fully stable and would Prime95 without fault.

We tried again with a bit more voltage, this time 1.512V, which is a lot for a 45nm CPU and 1.30V on the CPU Uncore even though we had left this at stock speeds. At this it would last five minutes before blue screening while burning in with Prime95. We did manage to squeeze a failed 4GHz overclock out of it, but it would only POST and not load the OS.

We think a better board would certainly yield better results for this CPU and Phenom IIs are certainly an improvement over the original Phenoms, but comparing to Intel's 45nm CPUs - especially Nehalem - the Intel chips are still more overclockable for the average enthusiast at lower voltages, without needing to resort to extremes like water, phase or LN2.

We'll certainly come back to Phenom II overclocking in the near future once we have more time to play (and not just benchmark!) on better boards (like the DFI 790FX LANParty for example) - at that point, we'll have a better idea of what's going on. For now though, it seems that AMD's promises of 4GHz are a little far fetched, but 3.5 to 3.7GHz should be do-able, unless there are some major BIOS breakthroughs in the coming weeks or the AM3 CPUs fair better.
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