Phenom 1 Overclocking

[xriqn]

Hi, recently set myself a challenge (build yourself a PC for under £50) and picked up a Phenom x4 9650 for £8. Is this CPU overclockable to a decent extent and if so what settings do you guys find to be decent? Yes I do know about the black editions being easier to overclock, have no idea whether this one I picked up is a black edition because its from ebay. Using a Biostar biostar gf8200c m2+ AM2 motherboard that I got for free from a friend of the family. Also is it possible to unlock cores on the x4 like it is on the x2 and x3? Thanks. For those of you interested, I paired it with 4GB DDR2 800 and a radeon hd 6450, final total came out to just about £25.

[xriqn]

D: nobody knows any good settings for these things?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

48 minutes ago, xriqn said:

Hi, recently set myself a challenge (build yourself a PC for under £50) and picked up a Phenom x4 9650 for £8. Is this CPU overclockable to a decent extent and if so what settings do you guys find to be decent? Yes I do know about the black editions being easier to overclock, have no idea whether this one I picked up is a black edition because its from ebay. Using a Biostar biostar gf8200c m2+ AM2 motherboard that I got for free from a friend of the family. Also is it possible to unlock cores on the x4 like it is on the x2 and x3? Thanks. For those of you interested, I paired it with 4GB DDR2 800 and a radeon hd 6450, final total came out to just about £25.

9650 isn't a black edition. Since the original Phenom only had a maximum of 4 cores, nothing would happen if you enabled core unlock on your X4 as all 4 cores are already operational. 

 

To overclock since it's not a Black Edition part, you have no unlocked multiplier so you'll have to rely on increasing the base clock. But as you're doing that, make sure to adjust your memory back to stock speeds so to minimize instability due to memory running out of spec. I would say try 2.7GHz, make sure that's stable, then maybe go up to 3.0, and so on. Of course, this all depends on your cooler and your VRM as the one on your board doesn't look as robust for big overclocks. 

 

 

[xriqn]

9 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

9650 isn't a black edition. Since the original Phenom only had a maximum of 4 cores, nothing would happen if you enabled core unlock on your X4 as all 4 cores are already operational. 

 

To overclock since it's not a Black Edition part, you have no unlocked multiplier so you'll have to rely on increasing the base clock. But as you're doing that, make sure to adjust your memory back to stock speeds so to minimize instability due to memory running out of spec. I would say try 2.7GHz, make sure that's stable, then maybe go up to 3.0, and so on. Of course, this all depends on your cooler and your VRM as the one on your board doesn't look as robust for big overclocks. 

 

 

I noticed the VRM was a bit small myself, I do have a decent cooler to compensate though (zalman cnps5x performa). Judging by what I just saw with that video, the overclock process looks similar to something I did with a core 2 duo based system last year, shouldn't be too hard. 2.7 does look like a good starting point for this CPU. I have always thought there was an x6 variant of the original phenoms.