Quest for a high, stable overclock

princemc · May 14, 2017

Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to overclocking and I have a 3 year old budget build I'm trying to squeeze some more performance out of while I'm saving up for a new Ryzen + Vega build.

My build is;

AMD Athlon x4 760K overclocked to 4.2 Ghz (4.5Ghz Turbo)

Sapphire Radeon R7 260X (Core Voltage +10, Core Clock 1100 Mhz, Memory Clock 1550 Mhz)

MSI A78M-E35

8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport

Corsair CX500 Power Supply

120GB Adata SSD

+3 Other hard drives I forget what they all are exactly right now.

I've tried to bring my CPU clock to 4.3+ Ghz and my system is really unstable and 4.2Ghz is the most I can get a stable OC on. I recently overclocked the NB to 2400 Mhz and so far have had no issues. As far as I can tell, I have no access to turn my voltage up any higher. It's currently sitting at 1.45v. However, I do still have all of the power regulation options still active. AMD Cool' n' Quiet, SVM control, etc.

I was wondering if there's any way I can get some more power out of this for the time being or I'm limited by my hardware in some way. I can try to provide more details upon request like UEFI screenshots of what I'm running at currently.

P.S. For those who ask, I've got a Corsair H60 for cooling so my temps are fairly low to begin with (22°C Idle, 43°C running Prime95 ~15 minutes)

Jurrunio · May 14, 2017

That CPU clock speed is around it's limit since it started out at 3.8Ghz. Maybe you can up the single core boost clock a bit, but I don't recommend you to force it more unless you have a better system and this one is just a toy that won't hurt if it dies.

princemc · May 15, 2017

None of my power settings would prevent me from boosting it a little bit higher? I don't have voltage control as far as I know but I still have things like Cool 'n' Quiet on and I see usually you should turn that off when you OC to begin with. I mean 4.2 is totally fine for me right now while I'm waiting to build on Ryzen but I just want to see how far I can push it and still be stable. 4.2Ghz seems kinds of disappointing to max out at.