Am I bottlenecking?

[Stephen72000]

I'm new to the term bottle necking but I think I've put myself in that predicament.

Specs:
Radeon HD6870 1GB x 2 Crossfire [XFX + HIS]
890FXA-GD65 Mother Board
Phenom II Quad Core @3.6GHZ [3.4 Stock]
Corsair H70 Liquid CPU Cooler
Patriot 8GB RAM DDR 1333
RAT7 Gaming Mouse


With the two 6870's they only utilize about 65% of each card and I'm hitting 100% on the CPU usage, not getting nearly the graphic quality I was expecting.

I'm not sure what EXACTLY would be needed to stop the bottleneck, but was thinking maybe the Hexa Core @ 3.8 w/ Turbo to 4.1?

Advice is needed, thanks guys for the help 😀

 

[amuffin]

Try 4ghz!

 

[Stephen72000]

Hey muffin, you were advising me on another thread about my H70, what do YOU believe to be an okay temperature to obtain once I OC to 4ghz?

 

[amuffin]

You want to be under 65C.

 

[Stephen72000]

Alright I'll try that right now and let you know how quickly I kill my system!

Ha just kidding.


But on a side note, everyone hears that over clocking kills your system, but if you keep the processor cooled enough does that negate the effect? I obviously don't want to shorten the life of my proc if I should just get a proper processor.

 

[amuffin]

Well, the thing that kills your processor are voltage. Temperatures don't do that much of an affect on the processor, what really damages the processor is the voltage! Remember, amd and intel specifices certain voltage for each of their processors!

 

[Stephen72000]

I'll assume that amd/intel are completely against OCing? Or do they have guides for safe OC speeds and/or graphs of Voltage vs Life Expectancy? Thanks bud super helpful.

 

[amuffin]

Intel for an example, specifies 1.52v for their sandybridge processors. However, overclocking does not require that much voltage, for EX: 4.5ghz is roughly 1.29-1.31v depending on the processor.

 

[Stephen72000]

Yeah well I've found that my H70 is weak, I OC'd to just 3.6 (From 3.4) and I hit 50C with the best p/p fans I have. And, I've seen it spike to about 53 sometimes so I feel that 4.0 is just beyond my temperature control [Arizona, ambient is like 90F sort of thing] Lutfij and I are discussing how I should just save up and go with ivy when it comes out, we're also discussing which case I should upgrade to in the mean time. So I just want to be able to get atleast 75-80% of my Graphic Power out until I have enough to go to Intel. I may try 3.7 MAYBE 3.8 and see how it does, but I doubt I could get much further.

[Also as a side question for a noob OCer ALL I need to do is BIOS changing voltage? If it's more advanced just point me in the direction of what I need to read to get better at it.]

 

[Stephen72000]

Thanks recon that gives me a very good idea of what needs to be done. I appreciate the reference, now is there anyway to tell what Overclocking to specific frequencies will do to my life? Is there ANY way to tell this even?

 

[Stephen72000]

If done correctly, the life expectancy should not be an issue, and your CPU will be out of date by the time it finally kicks the bucket.

This is something that I have never heard of, coming into the OC world quite suddenly (Vowing never to do it earlier today to having done it an hour ago HAHA) Why do SO many people believe that over clocking will KILL YOUR COMPUTER? [Caps were necessary!] I mean I have never heard of this, so weird.

Also, can you point me to a noobs tutorial on OCing, I changed something [I forgot -.-] and it made my frequency go up, but I recall not having to manually change my voltage. So my question is: Do I just change ONE/TWO things and the rest change in response? Such as these: Ref*Multiplier Vcore CPU/NB Voltage??


Also what do you mean "If done correctly" I feel that could be a simple answer or maybe not haha.

 

[Stephen72000]

Okay okay so it's more advanced than just changing voltage which is a good thing.

But I don't understand how you get 4.0 @ 1.5 AND 4.0 @ 1.4875, I'm sure you could explain how this all works for me but I'm sure there is already a thread that would explain all this?