High clock speeds on AMD FX making benchmarks and games choppy.

[cyrustheviruz1]

So i have an older pc, (actually i built it recently for way cheap and to put windows 7 on to purposely play games from pre 2013/2014) anyways, I have an FX 6300 on an asrock 970a/3.1 mobo, 8 GB of Ripjaws DDR-3 1866 ram, Radeon R9 290X card (sometimes i use my GTX 780ti, just depends on my mood, both cards are pretty close in comparison and to the time frame of the FX 6300) I have 1000 watt PSU, solid state boot drive, etc, etc... A cool little gaming pc build for under $400 to rock some early 2010's games. So when I overclock the cpu, which it can go to 4.5 GHZ on air, under 50c temp with a voltage of 1.275, totally awesome, but then when i run a benchmark like valley, 3dmark, etc. it moves super fast, but very choppy, the fps numbers are all over the place, same thing when i run certain games (Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 &3, Deadspace 3 to name a few) Why is this? I even did a fresh install of windows, doesnt matter which of my video cards i use, still does it. When I dial it back to 4.1 or 3.8 GHz, then it's normal, I get FPS of 75 in valley with AA at 4x, 1080p, awesome results for this hardware. I thought higher clock speed was better in gaming.... am I missing something? not doing something right? please help, thank you.

 

[RARRAF]

overclocking is not all about speed you get too a certain point and performance degrades its about finding the sweat spot for your system you go too far and it all degrades which you have found.

 

[cyrustheviruz1]

So maybe 4.1 or 4.2 is the best?, not the crazy 4.5, hell I got it to 5.1 with ease, (for bragging rights) Just because I can do it for maybe $85 to 100 more, I was thinking of getting another R9 290x and doing cross fire, would that make a difference as far as clock speed working at a higher value?

 

[RARRAF]

I am not sure but I would not think so maybe

 

[cyrustheviruz1]

I appreciate the advice/insight. I'm going to do the cross fire thing, just for fun/experiment. I have 2 SLI setups, one with dual 1070s, the other with dual 2080s, and I really like them both (except for directx 12!) I will find out if that somehow had an effect. Thank you.

 

[cyrustheviruz1]

Update: So I was using the asrock OC utility in windows... moving clock speeds, then running benchmarks, apparently if I set a speed then reboot the computer, then try the benchmark it doesn't act weird. My Ryzen or Intel i7 machines don't have this problem... who knew. I'm at 4.5 GHz right now, 56C after being at load for an hour with 1.285 Vcore, from what I've read this is an excellent overclock for a FX 6300, no more choppy, so I'm going to leave it alone.