- Jan 31, 2011
- 3
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- 18,510
I am somewhat new to overclocking and have a question about safety, notably with regard to the overclocking of my system's onboard video.
Here is my system info:
I am currently running an Athlon II X2 245 Regor w/stock cooling on a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H mainboard with two 2GB sticks of G.Skill DDR2 1066 (unganged), powered by a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 370 and housed in an Antec 200. I am using the integrated video (Radeon HD 4200) and running a single 7200rpm hard drive.
The CPU is stable at 3.7 Ghz, with temps of ~25°C at idle and ~50°C under full load. The main clock is set at 255 Mhz, with all of the multipliers left at default settings ("Auto"), with the exception of the memory clock multiplier, which has been lowered to "x 3.33", giving the RAM an effective clockspeed of 850 Mhz. The voltages have not been touched.
Now, please correct me if I am mistaken, but my understanding is that overclocking by increasing the system clockspeed and/or multipliers is generally safe (as far as physically damaging the chips), so long as the voltages are not raised above stock specs and temps are kept properly controlled. It is also my understanding that increasing clockspeed does not inherently increase temps if the voltage remains untouched, and that AMD's Cool & Quiet reduces temps because it reduces the voltage when the CPU (clock multiplier) is throttled down. Again, please correct me if my notions are incorrect.
My real question is in regard to overclocking the onboard video of my system. The default video core clockspeed is 500 Mhz, but can be manually adjusted to as high as 1 Ghz. I presently have the video core running at 900Mhz (yielding a video performance increase of ~60%), with no apparent ill-effects. I am somewhat concerned, however, about whether or not this 80% increase in clockspeed may adversely affect the health of the 785G northbridge chip (into which the graphics are integrated).
Again, it is my understanding that changing only the clockspeed of the core w/o increasing voltages should be relatively safe. However, the CPU is only being pushed ~30% higher than normal, and it has its own cooling fan, while the video core is up to 80% higher than normal, with only a heatsink to cool the northbridge chip. Is doing this still fairly safe or am I risking permanent damage to my chip/board?
And, yes, for the record, I do realize that I can drastically improve video performance by adding even a very cheap, low-end PCI-E video card.
Here is my system info:
I am currently running an Athlon II X2 245 Regor w/stock cooling on a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H mainboard with two 2GB sticks of G.Skill DDR2 1066 (unganged), powered by a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 370 and housed in an Antec 200. I am using the integrated video (Radeon HD 4200) and running a single 7200rpm hard drive.
The CPU is stable at 3.7 Ghz, with temps of ~25°C at idle and ~50°C under full load. The main clock is set at 255 Mhz, with all of the multipliers left at default settings ("Auto"), with the exception of the memory clock multiplier, which has been lowered to "x 3.33", giving the RAM an effective clockspeed of 850 Mhz. The voltages have not been touched.
Now, please correct me if I am mistaken, but my understanding is that overclocking by increasing the system clockspeed and/or multipliers is generally safe (as far as physically damaging the chips), so long as the voltages are not raised above stock specs and temps are kept properly controlled. It is also my understanding that increasing clockspeed does not inherently increase temps if the voltage remains untouched, and that AMD's Cool & Quiet reduces temps because it reduces the voltage when the CPU (clock multiplier) is throttled down. Again, please correct me if my notions are incorrect.
My real question is in regard to overclocking the onboard video of my system. The default video core clockspeed is 500 Mhz, but can be manually adjusted to as high as 1 Ghz. I presently have the video core running at 900Mhz (yielding a video performance increase of ~60%), with no apparent ill-effects. I am somewhat concerned, however, about whether or not this 80% increase in clockspeed may adversely affect the health of the 785G northbridge chip (into which the graphics are integrated).
Again, it is my understanding that changing only the clockspeed of the core w/o increasing voltages should be relatively safe. However, the CPU is only being pushed ~30% higher than normal, and it has its own cooling fan, while the video core is up to 80% higher than normal, with only a heatsink to cool the northbridge chip. Is doing this still fairly safe or am I risking permanent damage to my chip/board?
And, yes, for the record, I do realize that I can drastically improve video performance by adding even a very cheap, low-end PCI-E video card.
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