overclocking AMD

[Froger]

Im not an AMD person, but my friend was asking about overclocking his AMD CPU, i dont know whether AMD have a sorta thing like intel's K or if all CPU's from AMD are overclockable. if not could someone give me a list or tell me what tells you whether you can overclock it.
my friend has a FX 4300 i think, but i know its buldozer.

 

[MacLeod]

You can overclock all AMD chips. They don't lock theirs and force you to buy their most expensive chips in order to overclock.

Bulldozer is the 4100 series. Piledriver is 4300. Regardless which you have, overclock as much as possible via the FSB. FX chips really come to life more when the FSB is cranked up a little. Also make sure to bump up the HT Link speed as well. And for some reason, keeping it and the CPU/NB as close to the same speed as possible works the best.

Make sure to disable pretty much everything. Turbo, Cool n Quiet, Spread Spectrum, all that sort of thing. Set Load Line Calibration to usually the next to highest setting. Anything below that and the Vcore will drop under load. Above that and itll overvolt under load. Ultra High is the setting on Asus UEFI boards and thatll generally keep your voltage to what you set it at in the BIOS.

Current capability needs to be maxed out as well.

Max safe temps is 62C and max voltage is widely considered 1.45 for 24/7 use.

 

[Froger]

um, i don't mean to sound like a noob, i do know overclocking and how to, but what do you mean by terms like FSB and NB and HT link. i have a feeling though that as soon as you say im going to remember or its going to be something obvious.

 

[MacLeod]

The FSB is the base clock. I think the official name is HT Reference Clock or something like that. It used to be called Front Side Bus and FSB is a lot easier to type. LOL! FX chips benefit when this is cranked up a little. Its not a huge gain, maybe 2% or so so its fine if you just want to leave it be and use the multiplier only. Upping the FSB does put more stress on your motherboard tho and it does make a little more difficult to find a nice stable overclock.

The CPU/NB is the memory controller. Its on the CPU itself so overclocking it on Phenom II's made a very sizeable improvement. It doesn't have that big effect on FX chips though but the HT Link does where it didn't on Phenom's. Weird. The HT Link is what connects the CPU to the Northbridge.

The best way seems to be when the HT Link and CPU/NB are running about the same speed. 2400-2600 seems to be the sweet spot. Above that, there is no advantage.

So basically, just play with the multiplier and voltage and all that and don't worry about the CPU/NB, HT Link and all that jazz til you've got a good handle on what your CPU is capable of. Once you get a good solid overclock then you can start tweaking and seeing what little advantages you can come up with. Just simply increasing the speed via the multiplier makes a big and the main difference and then tweaking the other options just adds a little to it.

 

[Froger]

cant i just overclock it the same way as intel, were you just clock up the multiplier, but instead in the case also the base clock i think you said?
never really looked at AMD side of anything, i would always advise friends to intel.

 

[ObscureParadox]

You can overclock all AMD chips. They don't lock theirs and force you to buy their most expensive chips in order to overclock.

Bulldozer is the 4100 series. Piledriver is 4300. Regardless which you have, overclock as much as possible via the FSB. FX chips really come to life more when the FSB is cranked up a little. Also make sure to bump up the HT Link speed as well. And for some reason, keeping it and the CPU/NB as close to the same speed as possible works the best.

Make sure to disable pretty much everything. Turbo, Cool n Quiet, Spread Spectrum, all that sort of thing. Set Load Line Calibration to usually the next to highest setting. Anything below that and the Vcore will drop under load. Above that and itll overvolt under load. Ultra High is the setting on Asus UEFI boards and thatll generally keep your voltage to what you set it at in the BIOS.

Current capability needs to be maxed out as well.

Max safe temps is 62C and max voltage is widely considered 1.45 for 24/7 use.

I don't know where you've read that Bulldozer comes to life when you increase the FSB, but with all my overclocking experiences on an AMD system since Phenom II overclocking the FSB has made nearly 0% difference to just overclocking with the multiplier. If it's something to do with the fact that the Hyper transport link and Northbridge are overclocked then there is no need to overclock with the FSB since it can simply be overclocked with a multiplier increase anyway.

I've got a 8350 heading my way soon so I will do some testing myself to see if there are any noticeable differences, I suspect not which is why I will recommend he sticks to overclocking with the multipliers and a simple voltage increase on the core.

Edit : Just read your second post now

 

[MacLeod]

Yeah didn't mean to imply that its a huge gain by going with the FSB as opposed to multiplier. A guy on Overclock.net did some tests on scaling and posted his results.

Granted these are synthetic benchmarks but it's still interesting. Also in these, he's overclocked the RAM too so if youre running your RAM at stock settings, youre not going to see much of a boost. I run mine at stock settings because I don't overclock my RAM and I want this board to last as long as possible because Im gonna be dropping a Steamroller on it around this time next year. :lol:

 

[ObscureParadox]

Yeah didn't mean to imply that its a huge gain by going with the FSB as opposed to multiplier. A guy on Overclock.net did some tests on scaling and posted his results.

Granted these are synthetic benchmarks but it's still interesting. Also in these, he's overclocked the RAM too so if youre running your RAM at stock settings, youre not going to see much of a boost. I run mine at stock settings because I don't overclock my RAM and I want this board to last as long as possible because Im gonna be dropping a Steamroller on it around this time next year. :lol:

Wow thank you for putting that in there. They are actually very interesting results and wasn't expecting that at all considering all the experience I've had with AMD CPU's since Phenom II. I'll do tests off my own to see if it really is the FSB or more to do with the changes in the HTT and NB along with the ram multipliers?

 

[MacLeod]

I'm with ya man. Been overclocking AMD since my Athlon X2 days. With the Phenom II line it didn't matter with FSB and HT Link didn't matter either. With Deneb and Thuban, the CPU/NB was what really helped those out.

With FX, HT Link is what seems to help more.

Just to try myself I ran a little test myself last night using the Batman Arkham City benchmark and at 4.5 with multiplier only, I averaged 115 fps. At 4.5 via FSB (231x19.5) I got 117. Granted that's just one game and I don't have my RAM overclocked so it's not meant to be conclusive or anything but it does seem to suggest that FSB won't help as much with the RAM running stock speeds.

I'm still going to run my FX with multiplier only just because I want to baby my Sabertooth as much as possible since it's already got a ton of voltage going thru it to power the 4.5 as it is. Using multi only let's me keep the NB voltage at stock to save some wear and tear.

 

[ObscureParadox]

I'm with ya man. Been overclocking AMD since my Athlon X2 days. With the Phenom II line it didn't matter with FSB and HT Link didn't matter either. With Deneb and Thuban, the CPU/NB was what really helped those out.

With FX, HT Link is what seems to help more.

Just to try myself I ran a little test myself last night using the Batman Arkham City benchmark and at 4.5 with multiplier only, I averaged 115 fps. At 4.5 via FSB (231x19.5) I got 117. Granted that's just one game and I don't have my RAM overclocked so it's not meant to be conclusive or anything but it does seem to suggest that FSB won't help as much with the RAM running stock speeds.

I'm still going to run my FX with multiplier only just because I want to baby my Sabertooth as much as possible since it's already got a ton of voltage going thru it to power the 4.5 as it is. Using multi only let's me keep the NB voltage at stock to save some wear and tear.

Cool, that is interesting actually. I have no idea when I'll be getting my 8350 but hopefully it will be soon. It's a straight swap for my 8120

When you say tonne of volts what are you at? I only needed 1.375V I think it was for 4.5GHz stable with the VDroop control at it's second highest on the Sabertooth. Can't remember what the VDroop setting is called since I don't have it plugged in at the moment

 

[MacLeod]

I'm at 1.40 right now and I'm OCCT and IBT stable. I've been as high as 1.49V trying to get 4. 6 to work but no joy. Even at 1.4, that's still a lot of juice. HWMonitor shows 203 watts. I know that's a rough calculation and not an actual measurement but I still think it's safe to assume there's a lot of juice flowing thru my Sabertooth.

I also use Cool n Quiet so I'm sure that helps out a lot cause it down clocks cores to 1.4Ghz when they're not being used.

 

[Mgutierrez33]

Max safe temps is 62C and max voltage is widely considered 1.45 for 24/7 use.

When you refer to max safe temp you are referring to the individual cores, correct? I am asking this since I am also in the process of overclocking an 8350 and am trying to make sure that I don't surpass a bad temp threshold, yet there doesn't seem to BE a definitive number (AMD has even admitted that they don't have the proper documentation out for this CPU line). I got to 4.4 Ghz at your same voltage and am trying to push for 4.5 on a multi clock but my temperatures just seem to rage out on me once I head towards higher voltages (COULD my Ceramique 2 paste I am using). As it sits presently I get core temps that peak at around 57-58C during stress testing, and never get much higher than mid 40-s during long gaming sessions.