AMD Phenom II x4 980 Overclock To avoid GPU Bottleneck

[Firesauce]

Good Afternoon Everyone,

I have recently built a new PC and was a bit to hasty in my GPU and CPU choice i'm concerned i have severely limited my SLI performance do to my processor. I am currently running the following setup

AMD Phenom II X4 980 Blackbox edition @ 3.7GHz " currently running Stock"
Crosshair V motherboard
EVGA GTX 580x2 SLI config
Corsair H100 Water cooler With Arctic Silver 5 Compound
Corsair Force Series 90GB SSD P/n CSSD-F90GBGT-BK
Western Digital 500gig Caviar Blue for storage
Corsair Professional series 1200 watt PSU
Corsair Vengeance 16 gig 1600 DDR3 Duel Channel Kit
Antec 1100 Case all 120mm Fan slots occupied



Any suggestions on some sustainable CPU Frequencies i could safely maintain with my current cooling setup would be incredibly helpful.

Thank you all very much for your time.

 

[jrwizbang]

Just up it little by little. I had a Phenom II X4 965 BE, and was able to get to 4.0 Ghz pretty easily, without a whole lot of upping the voltage. Although, I'm not sure even the most extreme over clocking on your current setup would stop the CPU form bottlenecking your 2x580s. They are some pretty beastly cards. Go ahead and try for about 4.0 Ghz just barely above stock voltage, run Prime95 for a little while, and if it is stable, go ahead and see if it improves performance by any noticeable margin.

 

[Firesauce]

I'm not sure even the most extreme over clocking on your current setup would stop the CPU form bottlenecking your 2x580s. They are some pretty beastly cards.

I had a feeling that would be the case, no matter ill do the best i can.

Go ahead and try for about 4.0 Ghz just barely above stock voltage, run Prime95 for a little while, and if it is stable, go ahead and see if it improves performance by any noticeable margin.

I am about to run Prime95 for 1 hour and Heaven 3.0 for 2 full Ultra High Res cycles at stock. I'm going to do the same for a 4.0 OC and again at 4.2. I imagine ill have to make some ram changes at 4.2.

Thanks for a quick response

 

[Earnie]

I ran my 980 at 4.2 just by using the multiplyer,No other adjustments.Now I'm using an 1100T at 4.0,even with both of my 6950's running at 6970's(xfire)0 bottleneck in bf3 on ultra.So you should be close to expecting the same with the 580's.

 

[Firesauce]

I ran my 980 at 4.2 just by using the multiplyer,No other adjustments.Now I'm using an 1100T at 4.0,even with both of my 6950's running at 6970's(xfire)0 bottleneck in bf3 on ultra.So you should be close to expecting the same with the 580's.

I'm getting close. I didn't have as much time this weekend as i would like but im currently running steady at 4100. It passed a 4 hour Prime95 and hit 57c over the course of the test. It idles at 30c-32c. I'm hesitant to up the vcore past 1.5. I did get it to post at 4.2 with a vcore of 1.52 but i feel much power may severely decrease the life of the chip. Would anyone be able to tell me the benefits of adjusting the bus speed up from 200 as well. i have yet to find good literature on doing it. Thank you all again for your time.

Vcore 1.485
Dram 1.5

 

[Earnie]

going any higher than you are already at will really not do much,I would leave it where your at.

 

[jrwizbang]

Yeah you wouldn't really benefit from much more OC'ing. At that point, I would say just get a new processor.

 

[Earnie]

Yeah you wouldn't really benefit from much more OC'ing. At that point, I would say just get a new processor.

Thats not what I meant!The 980 is an excellent cpu,I ran mine with 2 xfired 6950's at 6970 speeds,0 bottleneck.
what i meant was going another 1-200mhz will not gain much from 4.0Ghz.

 

[Firesauce]

Currently running stable @ 4135ghz and from what i can tell using almost all the cards can offer

1.4870 Vcore
1.15 CPU/NB
1.5 Dram running @ 1514
bus @ 223

Temps

CPU - 33c idle
59c 5 hour Prime95
wPrime 32k 11 sec 1024k 316sec
Heaven 3.0 Ultra setting with normal tessellation - 83 fps avg DX 11

98% GPU usage on both cards.

39c idle - 77c @ Full load

Will post back 5:30pm EST time with Pics.

Thank your all again.

 

[jrwizbang]

Nice. Looking pretty good. Any real actual noticeable performance gain?

 

[Firesauce]

I'm currently looking at an over all gain of about 9%. Its not quite what i had hoped for but its enough for now. Anything past 4.2 gets to hot a full load. I push 63c in prime95 after about 45 min.

 

[Firesauce]

Best answer selected by Firesauce.

 

[bigj1985]

I'm a little late to the party but I was able to run my last 980 at 4.4 ghz with good stability and temps using an H80. You have an H100 so you probably get a little better temps. However my 965 wasn't even having 4 ghz. 3.9 is all I got from that bad boy no matter how many volts I fed her