Just curious...

[Kevin_Walter]

What are some of the side effects of not having the voltage to maintain a slight OC?

 

Obviously, if it's undervolted too much, it can cause freezing/crashing/etc. But are there side effects of not having enough voltage to push an OC without causing those issues?

 

I ask because I have an FX 6300 pushed to 4.0GHz on stock voltage. It's supposed to be able to go to 4.1 in "turbo" mode, but I discovered with some testing that it never actually gets there. It only ever went to 3.8GHz under load.

 

So after some research into how to OC an FX CPU, I decided to give it a shot, and found that I could push it to 4.0GHz with stock voltage without any apparent issues. I ran Prime95 for two hours without any errors and without my temps climbing above 40c. I've had no crashes or other apparent stability issues from this.

 

But lately, I've had some weird issues with games that used to run perfectly fine on stock settings. I used to be able to run BF3 on Ultra and it performed flawlessly. Now it feels really choppy... like I'm getting 30fps on average. BF4 is even worse... it's downright unplayable. Constantly stuttering and dropping from 60fps to >20 for no apparent reason, even on TDM servers with just a few people.

 

I'm going to be running some tests with MSI Afterburner later... but just thought I'd make this topic to get some extra info on what to look out for.

[Br3tt96]

Have you tried going back to stock clock and seeing then?

[FuzzyYellow]

VRM throttling?

[Sauron]

If it's stable there's no problem.

[TheMcSame]

VRM throttling?

This seems like a likely cause.

 

The FX chips are defaulted with a crap load of voltage. IIRC the 6300 will be pushing 1.4v out the box, might be wrong though. 

[incarnate]

the reason you see 3.8 ghz under full load is simple, that is the way turbo is designed. 4.1 is the max turbo and is only achievable under 100% load on 1 core with the rest idle. run a single threaded benchmark and i'm sure you'll see the the turbo reach it. as more cores are loaded the max turbo drops. until all cores are loaded and 3.8 ghz is the max turbo.

 

if you overclock and don't increase the voltage one of two things will happen. you'll either have a stable system or you won't. that's pretty much it. if you wanted to overclock to your max turbo you could probably do it without needing to increase the voltage, if it isn't stable it shouldn't take much voltage to stabilize