phenom II 965 be stable 4.0ghz want to go further

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grimsin

grimsin

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Dec 7, 2014
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my specs
cpu: phenom II 965 be
cpu cooler: zalman 9900 led
memory: kingston hyperx blue 1600(threw the xmp profile, which i have it running at with 1.65v)
motherboard: asus m5a97
gpu:gtx 760
power supply: corsair 650w
case: zalman z9+
fans in case:2 120mm fans on top of case blowing out, 1 120mm fan blowing out rear, 2 120mm fans on the side of case blowing in, 2 120mm fans up front blowing in

my overclock
cpu:4ghz threw the multiplier
northbridge at 2600 mhz
ht link at 2400mhz
cpu spread disabled
cool n quit disable
LLC disabled
cpu voltage:1.468v
cpu NB voltage:1.3v
dram voltage: 1.65v
NB voltage: 1.2V

core temp shows 47 degrees celsius with prime 95 blend test, id like to get to 4.2 but if i put my cpu voltage to 1.55v i can run prime 95 for maybe 30 minutes before the system freezes, its doesnt blue screen or crash, just freezes. with cpu voltage at 1.55 and 4.2ghz overclock i see max temps of 51 degrees so i know it isnt a cooling issue

any help would be appreciated.
 
Solution
L
I reckon about 4 Ghz is the sensible maximum of your CPU.
If it were mine I would run it at 3960Mhz (multiplier 18 and HT bus at 220). This would give you a safety margin for stability and allow you to drop the CPU voltage a bit.
This would also have your memory running at 1760Mhz, which should give you an improvement over 1600 when benchmarking.
I would run the northbridge at x12, or x13 if it were stable
Good luck
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What kind of power supply do you have? Corsair what? There are the AX series, VS series, CX series...

You don't have to necessarily run Prime95 for a long time to check for system stability, that only serves to check for maximum cooling.

Run Cinebench R15 a few times, if it doesn't freeze, you should be good to go, provided you're not always pinning your system to 100% like rendering, 3D stuff... You should be able to get away with it.

Prime95 isn't a stability test. I know this from experience, I've had a Core 2 Quad Machine that was overclocked to 3.2Ghz, it ran Prime95 just fine and then when I was browsing the web, BAM, bluescreen. It's not that easy unfortunately. Cinebench worked best for me to test stability, as me running Cinebench a few times on that config made the system crash. And even so, running Cinebench doesn't automatically mean you're set, but it's a good indication.

This is my opinion of course, I'm no professional overclocker.
 
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My sons phenom ii is running at 4GHz.
Originally it was a low budget 2 core 3.2Ghz black edition CPU, but I have an ASUS motherboard with a core unlocker, so it is now a very fast quad core chip. Pretty lucky eh?
I have another PC with the same CPU and motherboard, but I was a little less lucky, it unlocked and overclocked to quad core, but max speed is only 3.45Ghz (my wife is using it).

Things I learned
ht link makes no difference at all to performance above 2000mhz
Too much speed on your northbridge reduces your max overclock on the CPU
cool and quiet still works ok even with a big overclock.
Once you get near to max frequency, adding more and more Vcore makes less and less difference. Both mine are at 1.43V. They have been running overclocked for years, but a higher voltage apparently damages the CPU
AMD overdrive is misleading. I can run 4.1GHz on overdrive stress test, but not stable in normal use.
my overclocking involves changing the multiplier and the clock frequency - I got the 1600mhz memory up to 1800 Mhz, which helps performance.
I will give you a list of my bios settings this evening.

Oh yeah, and the power supply makes no difference. I had a really nasty old cheap PSU, and when it failed, I got a nicer one, and tried overclocking again, but ended up going no faster
 
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Power supplies that supply dirty voltage to your VRM can cause strain on the voltage regulation AND can cause an overclock to be unstable. (ripple is the key word.).

The OP could be hitting the limit and causing the ripple to go bad (30 mins full load on prime95 is straining on the PSU) and could cause instability.

A better power supply won't give you more Ghz but will give you more stable Ghz.

In this case, his power supply should be okay enough to pull it off.
 
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I don't know what else you could be doing wrong but I've heard 970 chipset boards aren't so great for overclocking, so that might be your bottleneck there? That 4 + 2 phase design doesn't look too promising to me.

Again, this is a suggestion to what the problem might be. 4.2 Ghz isn't a bad overclock for a 965.
 
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Mate, he isn't doing anything wrong
Actually 4Ghz is a really good overclock for a Phenom II, and with a little help the op should be able to get it stable.
Very few people get up to 4.2GHz
Your experience of overclocking may lead you to believe that a better PSU and more power phases will help, but actually my experience with the phenom II is that there seems to be little benefit.
 
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try this
CPU x18
northbridge x12
ht link x9
memory 1600Mhz

Then slowly crank the HT bus up bit by bit above 200Mhz. Mine was stable under testing up to 225Mhz, but we reduced it to 222 to give us a bit of a safely margin. This gave us a CPU speed of 3.996Ghz, with the northbridge at 2666 and the memory at 1778
When you reach the maximum speed your PC will go, do this as a quick test.
1. Drop the memory to 1333 - can the CPU go faster now?
2. Drop the northbridge to x11 - can the CPU go faster now?
In my case, it hardly made any difference to the maximum CPU speed, but obviously slowing memory and northbridge cost me in memory latency, so the above settings were a great compromise for me
but if I increased the northbridge to x13, my CPU wouldn't go faster than 3.7GHz,
If memory serves me correctly, changing the CPU loadline helped a bit - you could experiment.

my voltages were
CPU 1.43V
Northbridge 1.3V
Memory 1.58V
 
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Sure thing man.
 
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Lodders my CPU is a quad core stock. Think you may be getting confused on which CPU I have. But thank you guys for your reply's
I'm gonna start from the beginning though. I started with someone else's setting I found on Google which was a mistake..
So I put everything to stock. And I'm starting off with just raising the multiplier and raising the voltage when it crashes. Oh and put my memory to 1333mhz.
So at the moment I'm at 4.0ghz with 1.4125 voltage and testing. I'll keep you guys updated.
And it just crashed lol up to 1.425
Edit: crashed. up to 1.4375 volts
 
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phenom II 965 be stable 4.0ghz want to go further
Click to expand...

How far would you like to go?

The first problem I see holding you back is that, (7 year old since release date), Dinosaur you have cooling the CPU, your AMD 965 BE overclock will be limited by heat, there is no getting around that, you can go further, if you can keep it cooler!

Do you have any kind of budget for replacing that cooler?

I see you dropped the memory from 1600mhz to 1333mhz, that's great because you were overclocking the CPUs memory controller at 1600mhz and adding heat to the CPU.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/i...r-effect-raised-multiplier-cpu-overclock.html

Try manually inputting these memory settings and see if the memory will run at them, 1333mhz speed at 9,9,9,24 at 2T or 2N commend rate, set the DDR3 slot voltage to 1.50v.

If you do not want to replace your CPU cooler, then you are limited to fine tuning your overclock settings, and when you reach your thermal limit, you'll just have to be satisfied with that.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers...dition-overclock-guide-raisng-multiplier.html

This 4.2ghz overclock was back in 2010, it was one of the CPUs I used to write the overclocking guide.
Still have that CPU by the way, fully operational running my DJ machine.



I actually reached 4.3ghz on air cooling but I could not find any validations to that, as my next CPU I switched to a 2500K Intel.

The air cooling I was using at the time of the 4.2ghz 965 overclock was a Thermalright TRUE running 2 110cfm 120mm cooling fans.

Back then CoreTemp was not accurately reporting vid voltage, but was accurately reporting temperature, CPU-Z was closer to the actual BIOS setting voltage, (If my memory serves me?, as that was 6 years ago.).

 
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Here is some quick info to keep you going.
My Phenom ii BE are both Deneb cores, which are the exactly the same CPU chip as yours

When manufacturing them, all phenom ii chips were the same. AMD binned the chips, and made the lowest performing chips 2 core with lower clock speed, and the best ones quad core fast CPUs. However, at the end of the phenom ii production run, the engineers had improved quality so much that nearly all their CPU had 4 working cores and high speed capability. Marketing department still wanted to sell 2 core chips for the budget market, so the engineers underclocked them and turned off 2 of the cores. That is where my CPUs came from.
Both my CPU were sold as 3.2Ghz dual core. I unlocked and overclocked them both, one to 4GHz, one to 3.45GHz. There is no basic difference between the two PC, just with one CPU I was luckier with the clock speed than the other one.
AMD never sold a phenom ii at faster than 3.7GHz, and a lot of people on the internet were really happy to get to 3.9, so getting to 4GHz is not to be sniffed at.

When overclocking an AMD phenom, you need to find your maximum CPU speed, northbridge speed, and memory speed. Each will help to make your PC faster, but the CPU speed helps the most. So on my 4GHz machine, reducing northbridge speed helped me go a lot faster on the CPU. However, dropping the memory speed still didn't help me go any faster at all. On my other PC, if I set it to three core operation, it will happily run at 3.7GHz, but core 4 is not so good, and crashes every time at 3.5GHz.

Therefore
Experiment to find out how yours behaves.
 
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Thanks for the info guys! so far im going to keep overclocking just the cpu, i have it stable on prime 95 blend for 2 hours @4ghz, max temp 46 degrees, so im going to try 4.1ghz. once i cant go any further ill try your ram settings and keep going.
 
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ok so im at 4.1 ghz with 1.475V but getting some weird prime 95 errors on blend test so im going to try your ram settings see if it helps,

Edit: 1st core got a hardware failure after 15 min of blend test. So bumped CPU voltage to 1.48v and retesting

Edit: blend test froze the computer after a hour roughly. No errors just froze up. Bumped voltage one notch so it's at 1.4875

Edit: core 1 got a error 1 hour 10 minutes into blend test. Bumped CPU voltage to 1.5v , running blend test now if there anything else I can do besides bringing the voltage up higher any advice would be appreciated.
 
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Test 1, how fast will your CPU go with everything else stock and the memory at 1333. Don't just use the multiplier, use the HT bus too.
Don't bother increasing the voltage to 1.5V - makes hardly any difference.
Test 2, how fast will your northbridge go with everything else stock and the memory at 1333
Test 3, how fast will your memory go with everything else stock - set memory to 1600, then increase the HT bus to make it go even faster.

Your challenge - find what is the best compromise in which you overclock all of them at once and get the best overall performance.
 
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so i just used the multiplier but i can get the cpu to 4 ghz with 1.4678v with ram at 1333, if i try 4.1ghz with 1.5v the computer freezes running prime 95 for 10-30 min.

then with leaving the cpu at 4ghz and 1.4678v i bumped the northbridge to 2800mhz and cpu/nb volts to 1.3v, and ran prime95 blend test for 8 hours before i shut it down, no crashes and errors. highest temp was 51c
then I bumped the ram to it xmp profile(manually dialed it) to 1600mhz and 1.65v
so thats where my system currently sits, I think any more mhz to the cpu is going to need much voltage, like 1.55v or something
 
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I reckon about 4 Ghz is the sensible maximum of your CPU.
If it were mine I would run it at 3960Mhz (multiplier 18 and HT bus at 220). This would give you a safety margin for stability and allow you to drop the CPU voltage a bit.
This would also have your memory running at 1760Mhz, which should give you an improvement over 1600 when benchmarking.
I would run the northbridge at x12, or x13 if it were stable
Good luck
 
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