North Bridge Overclocking

Andrewst1021

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Feb 22, 2015
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I want to know what is my max voltage of North Bridge is, I tried overclocking it but my computer will turn on the fans, the power led, and tiny bit of drive activity only but won't do anything else. I have to restart a lot to enter the bios. Is the motherboard just not up to the task of having an overclocked North Bridge, after all its a cheap motherboard. Second, I want to know if I have to have North Bridge at 2400 MHz in order for me to take advantage of the RAM speeds for the APU.
AMD Kaveri 7850k @ 4.0 GHz, GFX @ 960 MHz
ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+
8 Gb (2x4) Sniper Gskill Ram @ 2400 MHz
Windows 8.1
Corsair CX series 430 watt bronze PSU
Stock AMD cooler
 
Solution
It's considered lucky to get anything above 2GHz on Kaveri's NB. They just don't have much headroom there from the samples I've seen. It's a shame because just taking it from stock 1800MHz to 2000MHz scales nicely in latency tests.

You will still see gains with DDR3-2400. I was able to go as high as 2500CL10, 2400CL9, and 2133CL8, with 2400CL9 still yielding the most bandwidth and lowest latency results even with just a 2GHz NB. The higher bandwidth is also going to help the IGP side of the APU greatly.

Max voltage? No one knows. I see some memory spec'd for 1.25v. We were all warned by The Stilt not to abuse it too far or it would break, but I have exceeded 1.5v on the NB and 1.6v on the core for benching and mine isn't broken yet.
You've pretty much hit the highlights.

The 'bottleneck' (I hate that term) for APU graphics performance is memory bandwidth -- the higher the bandwidth, the better.

Memory bandwidth increases with RAM speed (and low timings) and NB speed. If you can run your RAMs at 2133MHz with lower timings, with the NB at 2200MHz, your memory bandwidth may be greater than 2400/2400.

Glad I could be of no help :)

 
It's considered lucky to get anything above 2GHz on Kaveri's NB. They just don't have much headroom there from the samples I've seen. It's a shame because just taking it from stock 1800MHz to 2000MHz scales nicely in latency tests.

You will still see gains with DDR3-2400. I was able to go as high as 2500CL10, 2400CL9, and 2133CL8, with 2400CL9 still yielding the most bandwidth and lowest latency results even with just a 2GHz NB. The higher bandwidth is also going to help the IGP side of the APU greatly.

Max voltage? No one knows. I see some memory spec'd for 1.25v. We were all warned by The Stilt not to abuse it too far or it would break, but I have exceeded 1.5v on the NB and 1.6v on the core for benching and mine isn't broken yet.
 
Solution