oc cpu mobo

Ilijas Ramic

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Aug 3, 2014
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soo i have ga-970a-ds3p i tried few times to overclock phenom ii x4 960t but i cant the voltage throttles like crazy on load like im using stock 1.272 amd ,ax i use for oc 4ghz 1.332 well this is the second mobo and is the same like previouse i but the previouse died so i got replacment now i cant get the voltage stable on prime the voltage drops and stays on 1.262 and i was thinking maybe vrm overheating
 
Many cheap AMD boards have hot northbridges even with air cooling. I had to jam a 92mm fan onto my 890GX board between the northbridge heatsink and the CPU heatsink (a Cooler Master Hyper 212, said fan is blowing air onto the northbridge heatsink) when I tried overclocking because the northbridge heatsink just isn't good enough for overclocking. The northbridge heatsink was also a little loose and jamming the new fan in there helped force it down, but that may have happened in shipping rather than being common. Other reviews didn't complain about it.

So, the VRM or the northbridge could get dangerously hot if you want to overclock. They may need direct cooling, especially on a cheap 970 board.
 
If you are not using watercooling on your cpu don´t bother overclocking it because AMD in the past had some serious problems with overheating the CPU and in that way you can burn your motherborad really easy then you´ll need just to buy a whole new pc
 


Water cooling the CPU would mean the board has even less airflow and is then almost guaranteed to overheat with overclocking, so that is clearly a bad idea. It isn't the CPU that overheats, it's the chipset.

In the past, AMD actually had a problem where the CPU would crash if it was too cool. They have not had issues with overheating.

Even if the CPU does overheat, it shouldn't bun the motherboard at all because of thermal throttling and thermal shutdowns. The only way this would be a problem is if someone is stupid enough to disable these safety features. Even then, you don't need an entire new computer, just CPU and maybe motherboard, which is what you get for disabling those safety features.
 


Unless the case was made in such a way that it's impossible, the Hyper 212 Evo should be oriented such that the hot air is blown towards an exhaust fan and then out of the case. My Hyper 212 had no problem with such an orientation, so I'd be surprised if yours does.

Adding more fans blowing down on the VRM and chipset might help. That's what helped me bring my Phenom II x6 1090T from 3.2GHz to 4.0GHz, a decent 25% overclock. It shouldn't hurt anything, so give it a try and tell us if it helps.