[SOLVED] Some beginner questions on overclocking and advice.

[Justin of Smeg]

Hello the internet hive mind.

KIT: AMD Athlon X4 860K | ASUS A88x-plus/usb 3.1 | some Cooler Master Evo thing | NVIDA GeForce GTX950 | 4x Kingston 4GB RAM 1660 (I think) | SSD | HDD

I built my first ever PC a few years ago now and loved the experience and learning that came with it. I have also experimented with some basic overclocking and have a couple of queries:

Using my motherboard bios I changed the APU multiplier to give me 4.4 Ghz from the factory. I chose 4.4 because I read someone else saying they did the same to theirs and it was stable so I just tried that as a start point. I was reluctant to go further with my limited knowledge. Anyway since doing this I have never had any trouble with my PC, no crashes etc and was just wondering if this is OK or am I doing some damage which I just don't know about (I'm not bothered about shortening my CPU lifespan as this is just a learning experience).

I did one day just try to see where the ceiling was and turned it to 4.6 Ghz and there I did have some problems so I went back.

I couldn't really tell you what any of my voltages or any other readings are because I don't really know which ones to take notice of but I could find out if they were important. I read somewhere with my motherboard bios I can just change the multiplier and the rest is taken care of don't know if this is right at all? Because of the AMD CPU I'm reluctant to say what temps I have been getting but whenever I go to my BIOS to look I can't ever remember seeing anything that would concern me (no big red flashing things anywhere).

Does anyone have experience in overclocking with similar kit to me and have any nuggets of info about how they would go about it?

To be honest apart from getting a few higher scores on bench tests (cinebench) I haven't really noticed much difference.

P.S. Never got AMD overdrive to work, just kept restarting my pc and also the OC tuner in BIOS does the same. Missed an update or something? If anyone can shed some light that would be of interest.

Thanks to all!

 

[CountMike]

Hello the internet hive mind.

KIT: AMD Athlon X4 860K | ASUS A88x-plus/usb 3.1 | some Cooler Master Evo thing | NVIDA GeForce GTX950 | 4x Kingston 4GB RAM 1660 (I think) | SSD | HDD

I built my first ever PC a few years ago now and loved the experience and learning that came with it. I have also experimented with some basic overclocking and have a couple of queries:

Using my motherboard bios I changed the APU multiplier to give me 4.4 Ghz from the factory. I chose 4.4 because I read someone else saying they did the same to theirs and it was stable so I just tried that as a start point. I was reluctant to go further with my limited knowledge. Anyway since doing this I have never had any trouble with my PC, no crashes etc and was just wondering if this is OK or am I doing some damage which I just don't know about (I'm not bothered about shortening my CPU lifespan as this is just a learning experience).

I did one day just try to see where the ceiling was and turned it to 4.6 Ghz and there I did have some problems so I went back.

I couldn't really tell you what any of my voltages or any other readings are because I don't really know which ones to take notice of but I could find out if they were important. I read somewhere with my motherboard bios I can just change the multiplier and the rest is taken care of don't know if this is right at all? Because of the AMD CPU I'm reluctant to say what temps I have been getting but whenever I go to my BIOS to look I can't ever remember seeing anything that would concern me (no big red flashing things anywhere).

Does anyone have experience in overclocking with similar kit to me and have any nuggets of info about how they would go about it?

To be honest apart from getting a few higher scores on bench tests (cinebench) I haven't really noticed much difference.

P.S. Never got AMD overdrive to work, just kept restarting my pc and also the OC tuner in BIOS does the same. Missed an update or something? If anyone can shed some light that would be of interest.

Thanks to all!

AMD Athlon X4 860K is not an APU, no graphics on it.

 

[Schlachtwolf]

First basic when overclocking is decent cooling, if you don't know what the limits of your cooler is then you may well burn your CPU/Mobo. On that chip it is basic stuff, disable turbo, up the multipler and then the voltage to get it stable. More voltage=more heat=decent cooler

this may help you....

How to overclock AMD Athlon x4 860k?

I want to build a pc with this processor. I hear that you can get a lot out of it, overclocking-wise. The motherboard will be the gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H. I don't know the first thing about overclocking, so I want to know how to do it. Thanks!

forums.tomshardware.com

But to be honest even a "improved performance" of say 5% will hardly be noticable, if you get 60fps in a game you now get 63.... not ground breaking stuff.