How do I Overclock the FSB?

[sccman]

Hi guys,

How do I overclock the FSB? I'm currently running Readyboost on RAMDisk and am looking to see if I can increase the speed of Readyboost's load further. My specifications are:

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3
CPU: AMD FX-4350
GPU: EVGA Geforce GTX 970

 

[JimF_35]

The front side bus (FSB) is now called the (BLCK) Base Clock. I never recommend over clocking this as it will over clock the main bus which means all of the devices on the Motherboard will be overclocked like your RAM and Bridges. This is only done on older computers that did not support CPU multipliers. If you chose to do this you will need to raise you RAM voltages and uncores to make them stable too. Very hard to over clock this way because you can never be sure what it is that is not stable.

Why is it that you want to do a FSB overclock as apposed to a CPU Multiplier overclock?

If you are looking to over clock the memory then I would simply use the XMP profile as that is a known good over clock for the RAM other wise mess with the Memory Clock and not the FSB. You will need to tweek your timing to get it stable and the memory voltages as well.

 

[cdabc123]

The front side bus (FSB) is now called the (BLCK) Base Clock. I never recommend over clocking this as it will over clock the main bus which means all of the devices on the Motherboard will be overclocked like your RAM and Bridges. This is only done on older computers that did not support CPU multipliers. If you chose to do this you will need to raise you RAM voltages and uncores to make them stable too. Very hard to over clock this way because you can never be sure what it is that is not stable.

Why is it that you want to do a FSB overclock as apposed to a CPU Multiplier overclock?

If you are looking to over clock the memory then I would simply use the XMP profile as that is a known good over clock for the RAM other wise mess with the Memory Clock and not the FSB. You will need to tweek your timing to get it stable and the memory voltages as well.

older cpus and the new skylake chips. skylake is responding extremely well to bclk ocs with as much as a 20% increase

 

[sccman]

The front side bus (FSB) is now called the (BLCK) Base Clock. I never recommend over clocking this as it will over clock the main bus which means all of the devices on the Motherboard will be overclocked like your RAM and Bridges. This is only done on older computers that did not support CPU multipliers. If you chose to do this you will need to raise you RAM voltages and uncores to make them stable too. Very hard to over clock this way because you can never be sure what it is that is not stable.

Why is it that you want to do a FSB overclock as apposed to a CPU Multiplier overclock?

If you are looking to over clock the memory then I would simply use the XMP profile as that is a known good over clock for the RAM other wise mess with the Memory Clock and not the FSB. You will need to tweek your timing to get it stable and the memory voltages as well.

I overclocked my FX-4350 to a stable 4.6Ghz with the multiplier so I know its limits. I was going to lower the multiplier and increase the base clock at the same time to maintain the 4.6Ghz.

As I said before, I'm figuring out how I can improve Readyboost on RAMDisk. RAM is always faster than HDD or SSD so I'm making RAMDisk do the majority of the program loading. I have a 23 GB Readyboost cache on my RAM. I am looking into ways to improve RAM performance and transfer speeds between the CPU and RAM. I'm asking about FSB overclock to see how to do it to improve RAM transfer speeds.

I know I'm posting an uncommon question on Tom's Hardware, but I'm just experimenting to see what would happen and if what I'm doing will create a performance boost on loads.

 

[USAFRet]

Question:
What is this system used for?

 

[sccman]

I'm using it mainly for gaming.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm using it mainly for gaming.

And what specific benefit for your game are you looking to get by OCing the FSB? Yeah, I get the idea of "transfer speeds between the CPU and RAM"...but how, exactly, will that improve your gaming experience?

23GB in ReadyBoost cache?
What documented benefits have you seen from doing this?

 

[sccman]

Well for the benefit, I want to speed up the loading times in between each map or level. I also want to improve the initial start-up loading times of my everyday programs and games. I am currently not facing any issues with loading in general, rather I'm finding creative ways to reduce the loading times my games and programs.

As for documented benefits, I don't have any "Before and After" benchmarks or quantitative results for my loading times. I'll need to find something to measure my results. However, I have noticed intuitively that my web browser starts up quicker when I changed my computer's storage location of the TEMP and TMP files to RAMDisk. Because of that, I know there is opportunity to reduce my loading times by using RAMDisk instead of my Hard Drive.

 

[RedJaron]

Here's a few things to think about when you want to improve your gaming experience through storage speed boosts.

First, it doesn't matter a whole lot in most multiplayer games. Games like StarCraft, CoD, BF, etc can't start until everyone is loaded up. So you won't get into the game faster because you still need to wait for others to load and also for the server to sync everyone. The exception to this is MMOs when you're loading a new zone. Even then, you're going to have limitations in how fast this can happen due to the game itself.

Second, some games are hard coded in how long they load. Opening logos, videos, splash screens, etc, can't always be skipped. Mass Effect 2 had loading animation videos that had to play through at least once before it would move on. That meant even though I had it on an SSD, I didn't see any benefit when loading save games until I modified the game and took out the videos ( then it would load maps and save games in 1 - 2 seconds ).

Finally, realize the limits. Yes, a RAM disk is much faster than a SSD in terms of benchmarks. But sometimes the user doesn't actually notice or appreciate the speed differences because we react so much slower than computers do. You will quickly reach the point when you spend a lot more time, effort, and money than it is worth to get everything as fast as it can possibly be. And the actual speed benefit may not be a whole lot better than what a cheaper solution provides.

If you want to speed up the RAM disk, you'll get better bandwidth and response by optimizing the RAM frequency and latency timings than you will see by speeding up the BCLK alone. However, loading programs off a RAM disk is already insanely fast at stock speeds, so don't expect a noticeable difference.

 

[sccman]

That makes sense. One last question: how can I measure my load times with RAMDisk Readyboost? I want to see how my computer performs before and after.

 

[USAFRet]

That makes sense. One last question: how can I measure my load times with RAMDisk Readyboost? I want to see how my computer performs before and after.

Stopwatch.
Measure from Power button press until you get to the Desktop.
Measure from when the BIOS screen disappears until you get to the Desktop.

Same with applications, or other functions.
From click until it is done.

And please post the results back here.
Before and after.