Can you overclock a computer running on a gigabyte h310m a mobo

Oct 15, 2017
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I have a rig with a gigabyte h310m a which I’m gonna put an i5 8400 eight more gigs of ram it has eight now making two sticks of crucial ballistx 3000mhz ram (the board supports base speed ram of 2666mhz max I believe) and I’m either gonna get a gtx 770 970 or a rx 480 whatever is cheapest as I have limited funds. My question is does this board even support overclocking or are we also looking at a new motherboard?????
 
Solution
Your integrated UHD 630 on the i3-8100 would be better than your antique 7950 GT.

RX 480 is worth it, why wouldn't it be worth it? At least they have a full 4GB vram at full speed. GTX 970 is good especially when overclocked, but .5GB of its 4GB is slower speed vram that will slow performance when more than 3.5GB vram is used.
No, H310 chipset motherboards don't support overclocking. You would need a more expensive Z370/Z390 board for that.

Also, the i5-8400 is a locked processor, so it doesn't support overclocking either. Intel marks their CPUs that support overclocking with a "K" at the end, such as the i5-8600K, though those don't come with a cooler, and you would need at least a 120mm tower cooler for a processor like that.

If you want better gaming performance, you would be better off putting that money toward the graphics card though. Most likely, you would see the biggest performance gains just from a graphics card upgrade. What model of CPU and graphics card do you have now, and what resolution is your monitor?
 

QwerkyPengwen

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correction. All motherboard support base speeds of 2133Mhz. Anything beyond that is considered an overclock, and the max speed the board supports varies from board to board.

All Gigabyte H310 motherboard support 2133Mhz (which is base) and 2400Mhz and will support 2666Mhz as long as the CPU is 8th gen, which you have.
To get more speed, you would have to fiddle with timings and such to get the speed higher, however, this will most likely not work.

Also, out of those three GPU options you mentioned, the 970 is the only one that is worth it.
But mind telling us what your budget would be for a new GPU and what country you are in?
 
Oct 15, 2017
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I need at least a 2gb gpu of some sort and a hexacore i5 is a required upgrade too but I also need something that can be overclocked mainly the gpu secondarily the cpu. My two main purposes for this rig is destiny 2 and 3D graphics rendering software ie vue blender 3ds max maya maya lt autocad architecture and mudbox to be specific
 
Your integrated UHD 630 on the i3-8100 would be better than your antique 7950 GT.

RX 480 is worth it, why wouldn't it be worth it? At least they have a full 4GB vram at full speed. GTX 970 is good especially when overclocked, but .5GB of its 4GB is slower speed vram that will slow performance when more than 3.5GB vram is used.
 
Solution
A GeForce 7950 GT? Not a Radeon HD 7950? If so, that's a really old graphics card, and even if it was a decent card when it came out over a decade ago, its performance will be practically unusable now. Your first step to improving performance would be to remove that from your system, and use the integrated UHD 630 graphics built into your CPU instead. That should be significantly faster. : P

Aside from that, a graphics card upgrade should be what you focus on for now. The i3-8100 is a quad-core processor, and nearly all games should still run pretty well on that, so you probably don't need to upgrade your CPU right away.

If this is for gaming at 1080p resolution, I would look into getting at least a Radeon RX 480 / 570 / 580 or a Geforce GTX 970 / 1060. All of those cards should perform within about 10-15% of one another.
 
I agree that a CPU upgrade is not required for gaming or 3D graphics rendering. It would help and after you get a good GPU you can definitely consider a CPU upgrade, but a GPU upgrade would be much more useful at this point.

Oh wait, I just saw the rest of your 3D Graphics rendering stuff... that's a lot of stuff. Maybe you do need a CPU.
 
Yeah, if you're doing CPU-based rendering that can fully utilize additional cores and threads, a CPU upgrade could also be useful. Depending on the software, more cores with SMT (Hyperthreading) might potentially be more beneficial than getting higher clocks with fewer threads though. The higher thread counts of an AMD Ryzen system might be good, even though they won't clock quite as high. Or, on your existing motherboard, maybe a locked i7-8700 for a bit better per-core performance, albeit at a higher price. You might also need to replace the stock cooler to keep an i7-8700 boosting to its full potential under heavy loads though.

Ryzen processors with a similar 6-cores and 12-threads cost significantly less, though they don't clock quite at high, and you would need a new motherboard for them.

As for the graphics card, an RX 570 offers performance close to an RX 480 / GTX 970 / GTX 1060 3GB and only about 10-15% behind an RX 580 / GTX 1060 6GB, while being around 50% faster than a GTX 1050 Ti. You can currently find RX 570s new with a fresh warranty for around $150, even some with 8GB of VRAM, though you might need to send in rebates to get those final prices for some...

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/overall-list/#c=392&sort=price&page=1

They do require significantly more power under load than a 1050 Ti though. You might need a PSU upgrade for any of these CPU / GPU upgrades if the one in your system happens to be relatively low-end. Do you know what model of power supply you currently have?

It's probably worth shopping around a bit, unless you really need to buy through eBay. At the very least, you probably shouldn't buy a CPU from a seller with a ( 1 ) feedback score though, like the listing linked to in the previous post. : P

Again, I think your biggest immediate gains (especially for gaming) would come from the graphics card upgrade though.