I was trying to make and affordable Nes gaming pc and it turned out fairly close to what i wanted. The power supply is on the outside, but i just hide it under the table :D When idling i cant even hear it running!
Good day everyone, today I would like to share my proven way of overclocking a FX series CPU. So let's get right to it shall we?
First of all there are some things you will need in order to overclock your CPU stably and consistently:
Motherboard: You need a mobo with a 990FX chipset, I'm personally using Asrock's fatal1ty 990FX Pro
CPU: You are going to need an FX series CPU and please just get a piledriver, bulldozer is just not the right core for any cpu. I use the FX-8350
Memory: Get at least 1600MHz on dual chanel
CPU cooler: To overclock an octa core you will naturally need to use an aftermarket cooler. Keeping in mind that AMD uses lower quality CPU's you should not dare to go above 65c at any point in time. Keeping this in mind your options for air cooling are limited. I recommend using a CoolerMaster v8 or v10. When using watercooling you've got a lot more so choose from, basically any watercooling will work but when going for some higher clocks you should look for an H100i.
PSU: The reason your CPU runs hotter when overclocking is because of the increasing powerconsumption. Keep this in mind. Depending on your GPU you should be able to getaway with 600+ I was able to reuse an old 500 watt suply as I'm using a mid end GPU which never runs fully
Patience Overclocking is easy but it takes a long time as every chip is different, you need to perfectly balance your system in order to get the best clocks.
Ways to overclock
1. Multiplier overclocking: All you need to do for this is to increase the multiplier, use a black edition CPU for this. It is highly recommended that you use both CPU and FSB multipliers when using this method.
2. FSB increase: The FSB is the basic host clock that is multiplied by every multiplier there is (CPU FSB CPUNB DRAM), basically it effects everything.
3. Increasing the voltage: This is not an actual way to overclock but more a tool you can use. We'll talk about this more later on.
4. Secondary multiplier: The primary multiplier is ofcourse the CPU, but there are others. The CPU-NB, FSB and DRAM are the secondary multipliers and though they do not directly increase CPU performance they Will higher the overall performance.
Voltages
As promised we'll go more in depth in voltages but before we begin, I can not stress this enough: Too much voltage WILL hurt your performance, if you brute force it you are going to damage your CPU and you will NOT get great performance.
Now, there are several voltages to keep in mind all of these voltages have a different effect on the system but once again VOLTAGES WILL HURT YOUR SYSTEM WHEN YOU GET TOO HIGH.
Also keep in mind that things like Core Boost will eat voltage; before fine tuning any voltages you should disable any extra's you don't really need and reboot.
1. CPU VCore: On air you should keep this voltage under 1.45v or 50C at standard use. This is to avoid electron migration and heat or voltage degration.
2. CPU NB VID: This will be safe up to around 1.35v. (having never used intel I can't say for sure) but from what I've read this is something Intel does not have. The AMD platform used 2 different NB's one is the 990FXA which is the standard Northbride but AMD have also got a NB in the CPU, it doesn't handle the CPU core but has a great impact on the FSB, CPU NB and can help memory overclocking.
3. NB voltage(: Speaking for itself this voltage can be taken up to around 1.2v safely, which can help to higher your FSB frequency.
4. DRAM: The voltage of your RAM, it should be at or preferaly just under what your memory is rated for.
Voltage control and PLL are unimportant.
LLC is a setting that counters voltage drops and lowers the temperature; if you do not have it available you should find out what the voltage drop is under 100% load and higher your base voltage so that the voltage is always where you want it to be.
OC settings
1. CPU multiplier, I think we all know what this is so I will skip it.
2. CPU host clock, this is simply the FSB. When you start to fiddle with this setting you are expected to have a hang on the ropes. This is the frequency all multipliers are multiplied by. When fiddling with this clock you can achieve higher clocks with less multiplier, you will need a bit more voltage on your CPU though.
Now that you know what we're doing, let's OC!
We're going to break this part down in steps so that you can easily follow it.
1. First we are going to increase our voltage(VCore) to 1.4 or 1.45 and increase our multiplier to something not too special, let's say 4.5GHz. (you WILL need good cooling) Should you have LLC, feel free to set it to the highest.
Now restart and boot up. If you didn't change anything else you should be able to boot up without any problems.
2. Ok so great, we've got a nice clock but our voltage is still way too high so we are going to decrease it all the way to where we can't post anymore(are unable to get in to the bios). Till you hit under 1.3v you can just take it in 2-4 steps as it's unlikely you'll fail to post. Keep remembering your clocks or write them down because when you fail to post you are going to perform a clear CMOS. So once you fail to post set your clocks back to what they were and higher the voltage about .05v
NOTE: This step is going to be a pain in the butt, when fine tuning my voltages and clocks I spent nearly an hour resetting my system to find the best voltage and clock.
3. Now it's getting fun. We are going to boot in to windows. Should you fail to get past the Windows loading screen you should higher the voltage with 2 steps and try again. Once you're in windows run a 30 minute stress test at full load. If you pass move to step 4, if you don't, higher the voltage by 1 step.
4. Yay for you, you've just made your system run kinda stable! We're not going to stop here though, the next thing to do is to increase the FSB clock, increasing about 10% should be fine to start with. The CPU-NB, DRAM and HT multiplier will have to be changed, just higher them a bit and keep in mind that the CPU-NB should NOT get over 2.7GHz
5. Now you are probably going to increase the voltage of your CPU-NB a bit, don't go too high hough, it will hurt performance. 1.25v should be plenty. You can also increase the FSB voltage a bit if you want to get high FSB clocks.
6. Boot again, should you fail while using the same frequency that's probably because of changing the FSB. Just higher the voltage on VCore a but and you should be fine.
7. Time to run some stability tests. Try running prime 95 for at least 3 hours. If it works it's great, else higher the voltage a bit or change frequencies or multipliers. Keep a track on your temperatures. Keep them as low as possible, anything higher then 70 will probably damage your CPU.
8. Now this step is going to be the most time demanding of them all. It could take a week or more to perfectly fine tune your CPU but here's how:
When you are in windows, run some benchmarks and write the result down. After doing that go to the BIOS and change some timings, multipliers, frequencies etc. Mix them up, higher them, lower them, fiddle around with the voltage (keeping in mind that this stage is only for small changes and NOT for big ones) and boot again. Run the same benchmarks and see if there's improvement, if there is you're doing great and are on the right track, if there is a decrease in performance you're on the wrong track and should try something different. Depending on your cooling and how lucky you are with your chip I've seen overclocks of 5.2GHz stable.
9. Run more stability tests until YOU are satisfied it'll be stable. Some say it's stable after 2 hours of stress testing, others want to run it for at least 24 hours. For me I like 6-12 hours.
To all of you current and future OCers GOOD LUCK AND HAVE FUN!
I hope you enjoyed my little tutorial, I know I haven't been perfectly clear on every single part of my tutorial but I don't need to be, once you start working on it you'll get a feel for it. Keep in mind that every chip is different and only very few can reach huge speeds. Make sure you have enough cooling and keep in mind that voltage/temperature are deadly things for your system.
Greetings,
Rataridicta
Terminology:
CPU - Processor
PSU - Power Supply Unit
Multiplier - This one is very complicated but simplified it works like this: Your FSB gives your CPU a base clock, this clock is usually nowadays around 200 MHz. Now your CPU takes that clock and multiplies it by the desired amount. It does this by assigning cycles to the clock. Let's say you've got a clock of 200 MHz and you're using the multiplier 20 (meaning you'll have 20*200=4000MHz of clock speed) the CPU will allow 20 CPU cycles to run. I honestly can't make it much simpler then that, for more information I direct you to wikipedia
FSB - This stands for the Front Side Bus which is the collection of busses (gateways) that connects the CPU to everything else on the mobo.
CPU VCore - Simply the voltage provided to the CPU by the PSU
CPU NB VID - The power supplied to the north bridge on the CPU
NB - Stands for the North Bridge which basically controlls all the fast data processes like RAM and PCIe
Clear CMOS - Resetting your Bios to it's default settings
This is the one im getting but im pairing it with an fx8320 it is a great board from what i have read about.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-990XA-GD55-AM3-ATX-Motherboard/dp/B005LNG7VC/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1369999449&sr=8-20&keywords=am3%2B MSI 990XA-GD55 AM3+ ATX Motherboard
I will start off by saying this may not work for everyone but it does for me. By doing this it means you will only see uploads from your subscribers rather than it showing every time they like or comment on a video. It also fixed the bug where not all of the uploads show.
1. Delete your current YouTube bookmark if you have one.
2. Create a new bookmark but for the page http://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions/u/
3. Now every time you want to go to the YouTube homepage click the bookmark rather than the YouTube logo on the webpage.
Tip: You can still get to the old one if you want by clicking the YouTube logo on the page.
Hope it works!
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