AMD 955 BE: Newbie Advice

[h4rm0ny]

Hi,

New here. I have no experience of overclocking as yet, and I'm buying a new setup with an eye to trying a little overclocking. I wondered if someone would be kind enough to just check my intended set-up and tell me if I've (a) made any horrible blunders and (b) missing a better solution.

What I'm planning to get is:

• AMD Phenom II 955 BE
  
• Asus M4A78T-E Motherboard
  
• Corsair® 6GB (3x2GB) XMS3 DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Triple Channel 240 Pin Non-ECC Unbuffered CAS 9-9-9-24 RAM
  
• Scythe Mini Ninja Heatpipe CPU Cooler

If it's relevant for guestimating cooling or anything, these will be going into an Antec P182 case, snuggled up with a Sapphire Radeon ATI HD4830, three drives and a 520W Corsair PSU.

My aim isn't actually gaming. I'll be doing a lot of compiling of software and some database work, both of which will really eat up the multiple cores and every drop of clock speed I can give it. Which is how I'm justifying the money for this. If I can kick a little higher performance out of my system but still have everything very stable, then all the better. What I particularly want to get is the 1600MHz out of my RAM. From my reading, I should be able to get that and perhaps about 3.6/3.7 GHz CPU stable?

Have I made any stupid mistakes in the above purchase list, and if there's nothing that is actually an error, are there any poor choices? I can spend a little more, but am not interested just for incremental gains, but just if I've got myself a "bad bargain" somewhere in the above. I.e. you tell me that I'll get much better cooling if I buy slightly more expensive cooler X, for example.

I'm a bit wary of spending approx. £400 without someone saying: Yes, that will work. What if my cooler doesn't fit my CPU, etc?

Many thanks if someone does take the time to answer these,

Cheers,

H.

EDIT: And I guess while I'm here, I might as well ask abuot thermal paste. Do the different brands really make a difference? And if so, which should I buy?

 

[Ghosthud1]

everything above is fine but the ram and the cpu cooler

first off the ddr3 on AMD setups are not tri channel so 3x2gb might actually give you lower memory bandwidth then 2x2gb DDR3 (i think im no expert )

the cpu cooler you have choose isnt the best as its the mini version and quad core's can still wack up some heat even if it is 45nm

id spend more dosh too get a 120 true black or a OCZ vendetta II

 

[h4rm0ny]

everything above is fine but the ram and the cpu cooler

first off the ddr3 on AMD setups are not tri channel so 3x2gb might actually give you lower memory bandwidth then 2x2gb DDR3 (i think im no expert )

the cpu cooler you have choose isnt the best as its the mini version and quad core's can still wack up some heat even if it is 45nm

id spend more dosh too get a 120 true black or a OCZ vendetta II

Hey thanks for the reply. Swapping in the 120 True Black is no problem if it really makes a difference. I understand that Phenom II's really like the cold. I wont be overclocking it much, you understand though. Stability is going to be important. I just want to get a bit of extra performance if I can.

The triple-channel issue was something I had no idea about. The sites I've checked only sell Triple Channel DDR3, so I'm guessing that you don't get Dual Channel DDR3? Wikipedia tells me that Triple Channel falls back to Dual Channel if you only put two chips in so I understand what you're saying about putting less in and getting more bandwidth now. It's a bit of a puzzle, then. 4GB is enough for nearly all my purposes. I only went with 6GB because the place I was probably going to order from is only charging £8 more for 6GB than it is for 4GB. I'll have to do some more reading on all this. If the memory controller in Phenom IIs doesn't support triple channel (which it doesn't), then does that mean it falls back to Dual Channel for two of the modules and just treats the third module as an extra single channel one? Or does the performance of them all get reduced to being Single Channel. I don't know if anybody outside of AMD can answer that one! Even if it doesn't, a rudimentary online search even shows that people are still arguing over whether Dual Channel improves performance or not!

I'll try and dig out some more information on this (unless anyone here has an answer), but big thanks for raising something I wasn't aware of.

So True Black 120 much better than the mini-ninja, then? I'll check whether it will fit my case but I'm fine with getting that one instead.

 

[cavador]

my experience , phe2 cpu id code 904 , max stable 3.7ghz