senvae :
Hi people, I've been building my own computers for a few years now but I never tried overclocking any CPUs... or anything for that matter. I'd like to know if anyone can walk me through it. I recently purchased an AMD Phenom2 x4 955 Black Edition, and I'm interested to see how much power it has.
Here are the important specs:
AMD Phenom2 x4 955 Balck Edition
Asus M4N82 Deluxe Mobo (added mempipes)
Corsairs XMS2 800mhz DDR2 2gigs (x4, total of 8gigs) RAM
XFX GTX280 (x2 SLI, PCI-E x16 each) GPUs
Auzentech Prelude X-fi 7.1 soundcard
With my Asus mobo, I got 2 softwares that seem to try and simplify overclocking from windows environment, Turbo V, and EPU.
I'd like to know if anyone can give me a step by step intro to overclocking. All the sticky threads seem to be for Intel CPUs, so I need help.
I can possibly help you. I have a not so similar setup, however, we have the same processor so I guess that counts for something.
The current clock I'm running at has been stable through 14hours of prime95 and I still have prime95 on. If you want to know my opinion... my first suggestion which is what I'm going to say first off is to torture test all of your components to make sure they're functional without overclocking. Because, if you have a problem beforehand, it'll just scream at you when you overclock. My PSU woke up and died on me when I was overclocking this processor.
So, When you're finished that make a realistic goal for your central processor to operate at (frequency wise). Then work your way up without adjusting bus speeds and just use your processor's multiplier. Then run prime95 for about 10-20 minutes to see your temps (assuming they read accurately). Unless you're confident you have a quality cooler and not stock cooling, then go straight for your realistic goal (3.6-4.2 seems to be standard, higher than that may not be overly stable for more than a few hours of prime95 without having a lot of prior overclocking experience).
If your CPU is running at 62celsius+ without overclocking, you need to get a new cooler, if you don't have the money, you're up creek.
If you're running at 32idle@3.2ghz at default voltages (Without cool'n'quiet adjusting the frequency and voltage) then you should be able to push it up to 3.6-4.0 depending on the quality of the motherboard and cooling setup you have. I highly recommend you keep your temps at 55c or below.
You have to keep stuff like Frequency, Voltage, multipliers, Bus speed and heat in consideration running at above factory frequencies. I believe safe voltage for the phenom II 955BE to be 1.55volts and under. You're more than welcome to view my signature to see the voltage on my 955BE and frequency. I tried to use bus speed 240mhz for a while and that didn't work out well. The difference between bus speed as far as I know is it will increase the speed of your ram, northbridge and cpu without need for using multipliers.
Okay that's just the basics, when you actually start this up, I recommend you MAKE SURE you set your ram to the factory default values and make sure they stay there including voltage. Then, start adjusting frequencies, aim for a goal, try to get there slowly, if you're confident in your cooling, go for your goal and make it stable. First thing to do when you try to boot in your goal is to note how long it takes to crash (if it does). Then try to improve the amount of time it takes to crash. My goal speed was 3.84, but, I couldn't get it very stable. It would last 8minutes in prime95 large fft. Then I adjusted cpu-nb, cpu, nb voltage up until I was getting better results.
I went from 8 minutes to 12 minutes to 32 minutes to 3hours and 30 minutes to 14 hours and on going. As I speak I'm still torturing my 3.8ghz overclock. It seems promising thus far. If it stays like this I'll go into my motherboard and save my settings. I did have to sacrifice 30mhz though to get it stable this long. Heating was an issue, I would add more voltage and it'd take longer to fail, but, my cooling isn't that great.
However, we have different motherboards speaking of them. I recommend you familiarize yourself with your motherboard manual and options. Please keep in mind component failure is your responsibility and you take the risk by overclocking. With that said, enjoy.
Don't panick if you get lots of BSoDs. The only thing you have to worry about is if components start failing on the POST sequence. That's a very good time to stop and check stability of your system overall before you continue. I'm not sure if there is any definite way to know if you're doing damage, the only way I can think of is if you remember your system to be fine before you did overclocking and torture tested your equipment very extensively beforehand and it never performs that way again, you have indeed damaged your system. Not trying to scare you, just make sure your cooling is adequate. Overclocking is really an enthusiast sort of thing so make sure you're ready for failure in components because it can and probably will happen at some point. The best case scenario is shortened processor life. Aim for that hahaha.
Lastly, TIME IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! It can take days to find the right reliability and speed for you. It could take weeks. Perfection is hard to achieve. Personally speaking out of all this btw, none of this is really grabbed from anywhere, I just started it up and went at it. But, I have a lot of experience in troubleshooting certain things so this is pretty easy really. If you're patient and not a complete unlucky person you should be fine.
Also, If I'm wrong about any of this and people are reading it and going "Wow, that guy is dumb" I'm very sorry and please correct me. I would rather not see this guy destroy his hardware because I told him what to do and how to do it.