AMD FX-9370 underpowed by GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3, can I underclock?

[Hexxhex]

I had been having issues where my CPU clock speed drops from 3.8 to 1.4 GHz when under load. The core temp hasn't exceeded 150 F. In researching I discovered my motherboard only supports up to around 125 watt processors while my 9370 needs 220 watts. It was also suggested that one could under clock the CPU to account for less power. Could I/should I do this?

AMD FX-9370 Eight Core
GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3
GeForce GTX 760
Corsair CX500 500w
12 GB ram
Windows 7 Home

 

[CTurbo]

Yes you can underclock but your best bet is to just "upgrade" to a 95w FX6300 or FX8320e.

 

[Shaun o]

You hit the nail on the head there.

It is power related if the maximum wattage supplied to the cpu socket is only 125w.
Myself well I would just buy a motherboard that can support a FX cpu of 200W via its cpu socket.

And then sell off my other motherboard on e bay to claw some money back.

I would not go for a lower end model of the FX cpu range such as a FX 6350 or an eight core FX 8350e.

It defeats the object of buying the FX 9370 cpu in the first place.

 

[Hexxhex]

Yes you can underclock but your best bet is to just "upgrade" to a 95w FX6300 or FX8320e.

Suppose I'm not planning to spend money, would underclocking actually work to reduce power and improve stability?

 

[Shaun o]

Yes it would, but it`s any ones guess as to how much you would have to lower the cpu multiplier in the bios settings.
And what you manually will have to set the cpu core voltage value to get it to perform 100% Stable Hexxhex.

There is another option also if the bios of the motherboard supports and has the option or feature Hexxhex.

To disable some of the cpu cores, running it as a Hexa based cpu or even a quad core cpu.
So have a good look in the bios as it will greatly reduce the amount of power required required from the cpu socket of the motherboard ok.

 

[CTurbo]

Suppose I'm not planning to spend money, would underclocking actually work to reduce power and improve stability?

Yes it will at the cost of poor performance.

 

[RedJaron]

Actually, if you underclock your CPU, you'll actually see better performance than you currently are in this case because you'll get it to a level where it can actually sustain its clock speed instead of throttling down all the time.

The FX-9000 chips are simply higher quality FX-8000 chips. They're just factory overclocked ridiculously high so they consume nearly twice as much power, and put off a lot more heat. The CPU is trying to draw more power through the mboard than it can safely provide, thus it throttles itself down to 1.4 GHz all the time.

If you configure the clock and voltage settings to match those of an 8320E, I'm five-nines certain your problem will get solved. Set base multiplier to 32, max turbo multiplier to 40, then lower your VCore voltage. You might be able to simply put this at Auto, but I don't know if your mboard will try to boost the voltage to the 9370 levels. You should be able to get it stable around 1.3V ( stock voltage settings on AMD chips seem to be much higher than necessary ). I prefer using an adaptive or offset voltage control when my CPUs are on a dynamic clock boost.

Try this: set the multipliers as I said and your voltage to auto. Reboot and run a basic stress test ( Prime95 is a good one ). Monitor the CPU voltage to see what your mboard is doing. If it's above 1.35V, go into the BIOS and change the voltage mode to offset and then assign it a negative value. This will instruct the mboard to automatically raise and lower the voltage as necessary, but it will shave a little off the top so it doesn't go too high. If VCore under full load is 1.4V, assign a -0.100V offset to counteract it. You might need to experiment with the offset to find the best one. You might need to settle for a slightly higher voltage under load so that it doesn't drop too far when idling.

 

[Hexxhex]

Actually, if you underclock your CPU, you'll actually see better performance than you currently are in this case because you'll get it to a level where it can actually sustain its clock speed instead of throttling down all the time.

The FX-9000 chips are simply higher quality FX-8000 chips. They're just factory overclocked ridiculously high so they consume nearly twice as much power, and put off a lot more heat. The CPU is trying to draw more power through the mboard than it can safely provide, thus it throttles itself down to 1.4 GHz all the time.

If you configure the clock and voltage settings to match those of an 8320E, I'm five-nines certain your problem will get solved. Set base multiplier to 32, max turbo multiplier to 40, then lower your VCore voltage. You might be able to simply put this at Auto, but I don't know if your mboard will try to boost the voltage to the 9370 levels. You should be able to get it stable around 1.3V ( stock voltage settings on AMD chips seem to be much higher than necessary ). I prefer using an adaptive or offset voltage control when my CPUs are on a dynamic clock boost.

Try this: set the multipliers as I said and your voltage to auto. Reboot and run a basic stress test ( Prime95 is a good one ). Monitor the CPU voltage to see what your mboard is doing. If it's above 1.35V, go into the BIOS and change the voltage mode to offset and then assign it a negative value. This will instruct the mboard to automatically raise and lower the voltage as necessary, but it will shave a little off the top so it doesn't go too high. If VCore under full load is 1.4V, assign a -0.100V offset to counteract it. You might need to experiment with the offset to find the best one. You might need to settle for a slightly higher voltage under load so that it doesn't drop too far when idling.

I have never overclocked before but if I follow your instructions in the bios, it should be pretty straight forward?

 

[RedJaron]

Well I've been doing it for years, so hopefully I'm not glossing over anything I consider trivial that's actually tricky to first timers. And I find Gigabyte boards' BIOS to be not as straightforward as those by MSI, ASRock, and Asus. If you have any specific questions when doing this, just let me know.