AMD FX-8150 Overclocking

[jkhoward]

AMD FX-8150 Overclocking
by Joel Howard

Quote
I have managed to overclock my FX-8150 by disabling one core on each module. I was able to over clock the processor to just under 5GHz on a Corsair H100 with the maximum temp of 61C with a load. I ran multiple system benchmarks with the CPU and received a better rating with the four core processor with every test. The reason I find this to be true is that since one core at each module are disabled you are allocating more cache to that core instead of sharing it with another core. One of the main problems with the FX-8150 CPU was memory sharing between the two cores which would slow down the clock speed. This is no longer the issue when disabling one core per module. The chip I received was a lower binned chip because it has some temp issues not allowing me to go much higher on the voltages and my motherboard will not let me go over 5GHz due to the HT/NB frequencies. I recommend doing this with the FX-8150. I have also noticed my Windows loading time has increased signifiantly and now loads before the Windows loading screen comes together. One last thing, the memory scores at the same GHz as the eight core has jumped quite a bit once disabling the cores. I am not sure why, but I think it has do with the available bandwidth from the cores to the RAM sticks. I hope this helps!

The above is a post on another forum while I was working on this overclock for the past two days. Below are some benchmarks using Passmark 7 CPU and Memory overall system scores. The idea behind this overclock is disabling one core on each module to allow the single core to have access to more cache memory increasing single threaded performance at the same clock. The way I achieved this is by overclocking the CPU with all cores enabled until it became unstable. Once that point was reached I disabled one core on each module turning my eight into a quad core CPU. I was limited to how high I could overclock do to my systems RAM and motherboard. With the right setup I feel that you can get performance close to the latest Intel processors. i5-3570K? i7-3770K? Maybe.. but realistically the speeds will closer to the i5-2500K and i7-2600K Intel processors.



Passmark 7 (x64)

EIGHT CORE SCORE @ 4.5GHz
Multi-threaded CPU: 10,567
RAM: 1,487

Single Threaded CPU: 1,320

QUAD CORE SCORE @ 4.5GHz
Multi-threaded CPU: 6,269
RAM: 1,483

Single Threaded CPU: 1,567


UPDATE:
______________________________________
EIGHT CORE SINGLE: 1,320
QUAD CORE SINGLE: 1,567

1,567 > 1,320 FOR REAL WORLD PERFORMANCE
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

To obtain the single threaded score I divided the multi-threaded score on how many cores the CPU was using. The reason the quad core has a higher speed is due to the fact that it can use all of the shared cache just for one core which was a flaw in the Bulldozer architecture.

To achieve this you must have a motherboard that supports disabling one core at each module. My current motherboard the GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3 does has this feature along with the GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD5 motherboard. This test was stable at 4.5GHz and not any higher due to my CPU having a high CPU VID.. damnit! Also.. Window boots 5 seconds faster! Good luck with your overclocks!

System Specifications:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3
Graphics Card: GIGABYTE GV-R785OC-2GD
Power Supply: NZXT HALE82 HALE82-850-M
CPU: AMD FX-8150
SSD: SanDisk Extreme SDSSDX-120G-G25
RAM: G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB DR3 2133
Heatsink: CORSAIR H100



What do you guys think? This is my post from my personal forum: http://12tronics.com/index.php?/topic/397-amd-fx-8150-overclocking/

EDIT: NEW BENCHMARKS WITH VANTAGE NOW AT LINK ABOVE

 

[jkhoward]

In the process of setting up my computer for the benchmarks. I will have them up tonight or tomorrow.

 

[jkhoward]

http://12tronics.com/index.php?/topic/397-amd-fx-8150-overclocking/#entry895

The results are in!!!

 

[jkhoward]

Has everyone checked out the images on the link? I have the benchmark information on a jpeg file ready to be viewed!

 

[stickg1]

Ok, first of all, I'm not making an account on your website to view your pictures. Secondly, I have the same CPU and motherboard in my backup system. So out of curiosity I attempted this and here are the results. 3Dmark11 the score was slightly lower overall. Unigine Heaven 3.0 scored exactly the same with 4 cores vs 8 cores. I was able to overclock to 4.9GHz only having 4 cores enabled. This is 500MHz higher than my 8 core OC (4.4GHz). Still didn't help me any in my testing. And as for Cinebench 11.5, I scored 1.08pts on a single thread with 8 cores, and DUN DUN DUN 1.08pts on a single thread with 4 cores with one compute unit per core. Also even more interesting, my 4 core FX-8150 scored 4.38pts on Cinebench, my i5-2500K scores 6.80pts, and even my old Phenom II X4 980BE @ 4.23GHz scores 4.66pts.

So if you guys are tired of waiting for this guy to post some actual results, here you have it. The FX-8150 is still slower than a Phenom II X4 even when the FX is 4C/4T @ 4.9GHz vs a Phenom @ 4.2GHz, and the Bulldozer is MUCH MUCH slower than an i5-2500K.

Thanks for wasting everyones time "jkhoward"....

 

[jkhoward]

Ok, first of all, I'm not making an account on your website to view your pictures. Secondly, I have the same CPU and motherboard in my backup system. So out of curiosity I attempted this and here are the results. 3Dmark11 the score was slightly lower overall. Unigine Heaven 3.0 scored exactly the same with 4 cores vs 8 cores. I was able to overclock to 4.9GHz only having 4 cores enabled. This is 500MHz higher than my 8 core OC (4.4GHz). Still didn't help me any in my testing. And as for Cinebench 11.5, I scored 1.08pts on a single thread with 8 cores, and DUN DUN DUN 1.08pts on a single thread with 4 cores with one compute unit per core. Also even more interesting, my 4 core FX-8150 scored 4.38pts on Cinebench, my i5-2500K scores 6.80pts, and even my old Phenom II X4 980BE @ 4.23GHz scores 4.66pts.

So if you guys are tired of waiting for this guy to post some actual results, here you have it. The FX-8150 is still slower than a Phenom II X4 even when the FX is 4C/4T @ 4.9GHz vs a Phenom @ 4.2GHz, and the Bulldozer is MUCH MUCH slower than an i5-2500K.

Thanks for wasting everyones time "jkhoward"....

The results that you are getting are not the results that I received. When disabling the cores are you disabling one at each module? As far as the website goes you can download the images without being a member. I will see if I can get that to work if you are a guest. I apologize for that. I was not trying to prove that Bulldozer is faster then anything. I was trying to show that disabling 4 cores will improve the performance versus the 8 core not versus a i5 or 1100T. If done properly you should be seeing the same results that I got. Better single performance. : 😀

 

[stickg1]

I didn't see any improvement. I will check you pictures when i get home. I turned the "one compute unit per core" to enable in bios.

 

[jkhoward]

I didn't see any improvement. I will check you pictures when i get home. I turned the "one compute unit per core" to enable in bios.

Okay. You should be seeing some performance gains. What software were you using to benchmark?

 

[stickg1]

3dmark11, cinebench, uningine heaven

 

[jkhoward]

3dmark11, cinebench, uningine heaven

Can you send us a link with the pictures? I do not understand why your score was the same with both.. it could be something to do with those benchmark programs algorithms.

 

[stickg1]

Okay, i just have to get my son off that computer!


I got the computer back, I had only saved data for Unigine. I am running Cinebench and 3Dmark11 again, I will run 8 cores @ 4.2GHz and 4 cores @ 4.5GHz.

 

[stickg1]

3Dmark11

4 cores @ 4.2

8 cores @ 4.2

CineBench R11.5

4 cores

8 cores

Unigine Heaven 3.0

4 Cores

8 Cores

Little to no gain anywhere.

 

[jkhoward]

3Dmark11

4 cores @ 4.2

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/3dmark4cores42.png

8 cores @ 4.2

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/3dmark8cores42.png

CineBench R11.5

4 cores

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/cinebench4core42.png

8 cores

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/cinebench8core42.png

Unigine Heaven 3.0

4 Cores

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/uningine8core.png

8 Cores

http://i1061.photobucket.com/albums/t473/stickg1/uningine4core.png

Little to no gain anywhere.

The last image shows the 8-core being overclocked to 4.9GHz and the 4-core being clocked to 4.2GHz. Why is that? And.. I am not sure why Cinebench is telling you the same single-threaded score while giving you a higher multi-threaded score. It does show some improvement for in the multi-threaded side which should reflect improvement on the single threaded side but it does not which is what I find weird. I will download this and run it on my setup to see what the results are. The biggest bump of performance that I got from this was my boot times increased a lot. Are you boot times any faster? Do you have a SSD?

 

[stickg1]

The last image shows the 8-core being overclocked to 4.9GHz and the 4-core being clocked to 4.2GHz. Why is that? And.. I am not sure why Cinebench is telling you the same single-threaded score while giving you a higher multi-threaded score. It does show some improvement for in the multi-threaded side which should reflect improvement on the single threaded side but it does not which is what I find weird. I will download this and run it on my setup to see what the results are. The biggest bump of performance that I got from this was my boot times increased a lot. Are you boot times any faster? Do you have a SSD?

I got those unigine pictures mixed up, 4.9 was the quad core from the tests i did Monday. Cine bench shows a higher score for 8 cores because it's a multithreaded benchmark that can use all 8 threads. So it should score higher.....

 

[jkhoward]

Okay. I will run a test with Cinebench and post my results!

 

[jkhoward]

Can I have you run Passmark on your system as well?

 

[stickg1]

Yeah I'll run it this weekend.

 

[Gigabyte55]

To test this out you do not even need to overclock the quad core more then the eight cores. You get to a stable setup with the eight core and then disable one core at each module. In theory this will allow you to overclock a little bit higher but I was unable to due to my motherboard. I really want someone with a Asus Sabertooth to disable the four cores and run the Auto OC option to see how high the board will put the CPU.

I am stable at 4.5GHz.. I will be doing much more work trying to push it higher. I just redid my case setup and CPU thermal paste and it dropped my temperatures by 10C! I now have some more room to play around with it.

I built my computer from a Sabertooth 990FX, AMD 8150, Oversize Cooler Master heat sink & fan, 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz, 4 sticks, 1 TB 7200rpm 6gb sata HDD, with a Crucial M4 128GB for cache. Tried using the SSD for my boot drive & operating system, and had nothing but trouble. I can get the cpu to a little over 4gb, and loose stability after that. The cpu doesn't seem to want to run hot unless I overdo it, but all I have is AMD Overdrive, and Bios overclocking. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I've managed to tweak most settings and return to default without burning anything up yet. Need some better OC programs, and some smart profiles, which seem hard to come by. Any Advice? PS have ASUS ATI 6570 graphics.

 

[bernardblack]

AMD FX-8150 Overclocking
by Joel Howard

Quote
I have managed to overclock my FX-8150 by disabling one core on each module. I was able to over clock the processor to just under 5GHz on a Corsair H100 with the maximum temp of 61C with a load. I ran multiple system benchmarks with the CPU and received a better rating with the four core processor with every test. The reason I find this to be true is that since one core at each module are disabled you are allocating more cache to that core instead of sharing it with another core. One of the main problems with the FX-8150 CPU was memory sharing between the two cores which would slow down the clock speed. This is no longer the issue when disabling one core per module. The chip I received was a lower binned chip because it has some temp issues not allowing me to go much higher on the voltages and my motherboard will not let me go over 5GHz due to the HT/NB frequencies. I recommend doing this with the FX-8150. I have also noticed my Windows loading time has increased signifiantly and now loads before the Windows loading screen comes together. One last thing, the memory scores at the same GHz as the eight core has jumped quite a bit once disabling the cores. I am not sure why, but I think it has do with the available bandwidth from the cores to the RAM sticks. I hope this helps!

The above is a post on another forum while I was working on this overclock for the past two days. Below are some benchmarks using Passmark 7 CPU and Memory overall system scores. The idea behind this overclock is disabling one core on each module to allow the single core to have access to more cache memory increasing single threaded performance at the same clock. The way I achieved this is by overclocking the CPU with all cores enabled until it became unstable. Once that point was reached I disabled one core on each module turning my eight into a quad core CPU. I was limited to how high I could overclock do to my systems RAM and motherboard. With the right setup I feel that you can get performance close to the latest Intel processors. i5-3570K? i7-3770K? Maybe.. but realistically the speeds will closer to the i5-2500K and i7-2600K Intel processors.



Passmark 7 (x64)

EIGHT CORE SCORE @ 4.5GHz
Multi-threaded CPU: 10,567
RAM: 1,487

Single Threaded CPU: 1,320

QUAD CORE SCORE @ 4.5GHz
Multi-threaded CPU: 6,269
RAM: 1,483

Single Threaded CPU: 1,567


UPDATE:
______________________________________
EIGHT CORE SINGLE: 1,320
QUAD CORE SINGLE: 1,567

1,567 > 1,320 FOR REAL WORLD PERFORMANCE
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

To obtain the single threaded score I divided the multi-threaded score on how many cores the CPU was using. The reason the quad core has a higher speed is due to the fact that it can use all of the shared cache just for one core which was a flaw in the Bulldozer architecture.

To achieve this you must have a motherboard that supports disabling one core at each module. My current motherboard the GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3 does has this feature along with the GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD5 motherboard. This test was stable at 4.5GHz and not any higher due to my CPU having a high CPU VID.. damnit! Also.. Window boots 5 seconds faster! Good luck with your overclocks!

System Specifications:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3
Graphics Card: GIGABYTE GV-R785OC-2GD
Power Supply: NZXT HALE82 HALE82-850-M
CPU: AMD FX-8150
SSD: SanDisk Extreme SDSSDX-120G-G25
RAM: G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB DR3 2133
Heatsink: CORSAIR H100



What do you guys think? This is my post from my personal forum: http://12tronics.com/index.php?/topic/397-amd-fx-8150-overclocking/

EDIT: NEW BENCHMARKS WITH VANTAGE NOW AT LINK ABOVE

I know this is old, but I'm thinking about doing the same thing. For better performance, less heat and less power consumption. I currently have it overclocked as an 8-core at 4.75ghz, running 1.42 vcore, on water cooling. I was able to get as high as 4.8ghz, but all though it can sit and do stress tests all day long (seemingly), I'd still get an occasional crash, every once in a blue moon. So, if I cut the cores down to one per module, should I reduce the voltage? Or do I leave my voltage and overclock settings the same?

 

[bernardblack]

To test this out you do not even need to overclock the quad core more then the eight cores. You get to a stable setup with the eight core and then disable one core at each module. In theory this will allow you to overclock a little bit higher but I was unable to due to my motherboard. I really want someone with a Asus Sabertooth to disable the four cores and run the Auto OC option to see how high the board will put the CPU.

I am stable at 4.5GHz.. I will be doing much more work trying to push it higher. I just redid my case setup and CPU thermal paste and it dropped my temperatures by 10C! I now have some more room to play around with it.

I built my computer from a Sabertooth 990FX, AMD 8150, Oversize Cooler Master heat sink & fan, 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz, 4 sticks, 1 TB 7200rpm 6gb sata HDD, with a Crucial M4 128GB for cache. Tried using the SSD for my boot drive & operating system, and had nothing but trouble. I can get the cpu to a little over 4gb, and loose stability after that. The cpu doesn't seem to want to run hot unless I overdo it, but all I have is AMD Overdrive, and Bios overclocking. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I've managed to tweak most settings and return to default without burning anything up yet. Need some better OC programs, and some smart profiles, which seem hard to come by. Any Advice? PS have ASUS ATI 6570 graphics.

I know this is old, but this is VERY odd. You are running my exact setup, minus some different manufacture choices for various things, but overall, the exact same setup...right down to the mainboard and OS dedicated SSD. Even on a cheap 79.99 mainboard, my wife is able to run my FX8150 at 4.2GHZ. This processor should be able to go to 4.2 with no voltage boost....what kind of power supply are/ were you running? How many watts? This is a hungry CPU and HD6950's/ 6970's are worse in power consumption. You could be running into a bad CPU or under powered system.

 

[jkhoward]

I honestly do not remember what I had at the time. I think it was the Corsair 750 HX but I could be wrong.. it has been quiet sometime. I eventually just sold the system and got a Intel CPU. I believe I found it to be a low binned chip. I couldn't really push it any further without it running super hot. I always get the low binned chips and my friends that I build systems for always get the high binned chips! ):