While staying below temp, is their a reason to not overclock as high as possible?

[r_collins36]

About me: 45, a professional but never been into computer internals and when I was putting the effort into learning for fun, it was DOS and floppy drives. On a whim I decided to overclock and have had fun figuring it out. But I have a question...

Question about overclocking: I clocked my chip stable at 3.8Mhz and 61c (3 hours, self stop). Then I clocked it stable at 4.0 and 74c (1 hour, self stop). I decided that was to hot and bought the 55$ cooler, mainly just because I was having fun. Now 4.0Mhz is running at only 51c. I've upped the CPU to 4.2Mhz and 1.275000V and it ran stable for 50 minutes before crashing. Temperatures only got to 54c. Should I continue to up the voltage to find a stability (under 62c) for 4.2 Mhz? Is their a reason I wouldn't want to increase the overclocking until I get to 60c? 4.5, 4.8Mhz, etc? Is power source (hardware) a factor in all this?

System:
Chip: AMD FX-3600 six core 3.5Mhz
Memory: 8176mb CDDR3
Board: M5a97 LE R2.0
Cooling: Lepa Aquachanger 120 (self contained liquid cooler)
Power Source: No idea...bought with system so cheap.

Programs:
Prime65: for load
HWMonitor: for computer statistics


Thanks for the wisdom,
RC

 

[Supahos]

I don't remember to bad voltage on bulldozer but at some point the voltage will start harming the chip itself.

 

[Darkbreeze]

No, you shouldn't. In fact, I'm highly surprised you can even achieve what you have on that motherboard. That board doesn't even have heatsinks on the VRMs, and while you might be staying under spec on the CPU temperature, you are almost certainly NOT staying under spec on the VRM temperature, which is probably 100% where your instability is coming from.

That is not a very high quality board, both when it was new AND even more so now with some miles on it. If you want to overclock, which I FULLY understand, even though you are probably not going to gain a terrific lot of benefit from overclocking that old platform (Don't get me wrong, you'll see SOME gains out of it), I'd look at finding a better board.

(Be sure to check when looking for a motherboard that any of the models shown below are either 990fx, 990 or 970 chipsets. A Z170 Extreme6 for example, is not going to work with your FX processor, so, in this example, you want to look for the 990/990fx Extreme6.)

GA-990FXA-UD7
Extreme6
Extreme9
Fatal1ty 990FX Professional
Crosshair V Formula-Z
Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
GA-99FXA-UD5
MSI GD80V2
M5A99FX PRO R2.0
GA-99FXA-UD3
MSI GD65V2
990FX Killer
Extreme4
M5A99X EVO (R2.0 as well)
GA-990XA-UD3
990XA-GD55
GA-970A-UD3P
M5A97 or EVO or PRO (R.2 as well)
GA-970A-UD3
970 GAMING
970A SLI Krait (USB 3.1 supported)


As far as any further overclocking, I'd stop where you are still stable and call it good without any further increase in voltage or you're likely to completely ruin that motherboard.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I don't remember to bad voltage on bulldozer but at some point the voltage will start harming the chip itself.

FX-6300 is Piledriver, not Bulldozer.

 

[Supahos]

Oh yeah that's right. Though didn't they have the same safe voltage? Been a while since I oced an am3 I'm out of practice

 

[USAFRet]

it ran stable for 50 minutes before crashing

That's not stable.

 

[r_collins36]

Thank you for the info and effort

For anyone else with with same question/system, I've decided on 4.1 Mhz and 1.272v, which has run for almost 3 hours stable. at a Max of 52c temp. I'll let it keep going for a hour or two more to be sure.

@darkbreeze: I've no idea what VRM is. If the HWMonitor doesn't say it, I've no clue. At 4.1Mhz, CPU: Max 53c, Mainboard 34c, AMD FX-6300 Package?:44c, Assembly, Air flow, and SSD airflow: 38c, GPU:41c. Thank you for your help and suggestions.

 

[Supahos]

There is no sensor on the vrms they are what supplies the cpu socket power. A lot of am3 board (especially on the 8*** series chips) overheat and slow the cpu down to keep from melting. If you get too carried away with that oc you'll run into it but I'm not shocked you've gotten to 4.1

 

[Darkbreeze]

VRMs:

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1229-anatomy-of-a-motherboard-what-is-a-vrm-mosfet?showall=1


Actually, a LOT of boards DO have some kind of thermal monitoring for the VRMs if you use HWinfo and look at some of the motherboard thermal sensors. I can't tell you for that board specifically if it will or not, and it probably doesn't matter because with ANY overclock above the maximum stock turbo speed it's likely to be a problem anyhow.

As for the stability, USAFRet is 100% correct. That's not even, nor is 3 hours, anywhere NEAR to establishing stability and you're probably not running the correct software to validate stability anyhow. Here is the quick and dirty version:

Quick and dirty overview of overclocking validation procedure.

Set CPU multiplier and voltage at desired settings in BIOS. Do not use presets or automatic utilities. These will overcompensate on core and other voltages. It is much better to configure most core settings manually, and leave anything left over on auto until a later point in time if wish to come back and tweak settings such as cache (Uncore) frequency, System agent voltage, VCCIO (Internal memory controller) and memory speeds or timings (RAM) AFTER the CPU overclock is fully stable.

Save bios settings (As a new BIOS profile if your bios supports multiple profiles) and exit bios.

Boot into the Windows desktop environment. Download and install Prime95 version 26.6.

Download and install either HWinfo or CoreTemp.

Open HWinfo and run "Sensors only" or open CoreTemp.

Run Prime95 (ONLY version 26.6) and choose the "Small FFT test option". Run this for 15 minutes while monitoring your core/package temperatures to verify that you do not exceed the thermal specifications of your CPU.

(This should be considered to be 80°C for most generations of Intel processor and for current Ryzen CPUs. For older AMD FX and Phenom series, you should use a thermal monitor that has options for "Distance to TJmax" and you want to NOT see distance to TJmax drop below 10°C distance to TJmax. Anything that is MORE than 10°C distance to TJmax is within the allowed thermal envelope.)

If your CPU passes the thermal compliance test, move on to stability.

Download and install Realbench. Run Realbench and choose the Stress test option. Choose a value from the available memory (RAM) options that is equal to approximately half of your installed memory capacity. If you have 16GB, choose 8GB. If you have 8GB, choose 4GB, etc. Click start and allow the stability test to run for 8 hours. Do not plan to use the system for ANYTHING else while it is running. It will run realistic AVX and handbrake workloads and if it passes 8 hours of testing it is probably about as stable as you can reasonably expect.

If you wish to check stability further you can run 12-24 hours of Prime95 Blend mode or Small FFT.

You do not need to simultaneously run HWinfo or CoreTemp while running Realbench as you should have already performed the thermal compliance test PLUS Realbench will show current CPU temperatures while it is running.

If you run the additional stability test using Prime95 Blend/Small FFT modes for 12-24 hours, you will WANT to also run HWinfo alongside it. Monitor HWinfo periodically to verify that no cores/threads are showing less than 100% usage. If it is, then that worker has errored out and the test should be stopped.

If you find there are errors on ANY of the stability tests including Realbench or Prime95, or any other stress testing utility, you need to make a change in the bios. This could be either dropping the multiplier to a lower factor or increasing the voltage while leaving the multiplier the same. If you change voltage or multiplier at ANY time, you need to start over again at the beginning and verify thermal compliance again.

A more in depth but general guide that is still intended for beginners or those who have had a small amount of experience overclocking can be found here:


*CPU overclocking guide for beginners

 

[r_collins36]

Good lord! I'm not going to do that. I'll leave it as is and if it causes problems I'll revert back to the original. If it fries something I guess it will give me a reason to upgrade. Thank you for the detail, I really appreciate it. It helped a lot.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Once you realize it's causing problems, especially if you've been running the system for a while, it will be too late. If the system is not stable from day 1 you will be incrementally corrupting the operating system and ALL your files. CPU and memory corruption to data is no joke.

Bluescreens, shut downs, freezing, random errors, these are only signs of MAJOR instability, but there is definitely always a high probability of minor instability on the order of .0001%, which is enough that in a couple of months you'll be trying to figure out which piece of hardware has failed due to constant errors, when it's not the hardware at all but instead is the fact that your operating system and much of your stored data like music, movies, pictures, documents, installation programs, etc., are all corrupted. Anything you work with that gets processed and written is at risk.

It's getting through 4-5 x 10^9 cycles every second (ok well full load it is at least) so if you have a 0.001% malfunction rate the number of errors is still immense. You might not see it or care about it in normal usage but trust me you will see it in the data you're storing, especially after running unstable for a couple of months

If you are happy with your system telling you 2+2=1, and writing a zero where a one should be or a one where there should be two zeros, then it is of course your prerogative, but I suspect you might be in for a sad day in the not too distant future. If you are not willing to put in the work required to validate stability on your overclock, then you should simply return the entire configuration to the default stock settings and not take the risk.

Overclocking is terribly difficult to validate, but it's not for the faint of heart either.