AMD FX 6300 overclocking

[Selena Anderson]

Hello all I'd like to overclock my FX6300 processor but I am confused what cooler to choose. Should I go for an air cooler or liquid cooling? any help would be appreciated.

 

[HotJob]

I have this processor as well. Mine is overclocked from 3.5 Ghz to 4.2 on stock voltage. I have a Biostar TA970 motherboard, so I try not to stress the budget VRMs too much. I have heard the FX-6300 can go higher, but I lost the silicon lottery on core 2, which crashes in Prime95 after about 2 hours at anything higher than 4.2 Ghz
I would recommend a mid-range air cooler unless you really plan to up the voltage on it. I use the (in)famous CoolerMaster Hyper212 Evo. Cost me $25 USD and fits in my case by 1 mm. It doesn't make sense to put Noctua- level cooling on what is essentially a last generation budget chip.

 

[EXCellR8]

What's your goal speed, or are you just tinkering?

212 EVO is tough to not recommend at the price they are selling them for, other than that though a simple AIO liquid cooler would be a great solution.

Use a premium thermal compound with either and it should be fine with either option.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Hello all I'd like to overclock my FX6300 processor but I am confused what cooler to choose. Should I go for an air cooler or liquid cooling? any help would be appreciated.

Before your do any overclocking, please tell us which motherboard you have.

 

[amd6502]

Before your do any overclocking, please tell us which motherboard you have.

Yes I'd think that be pretty important. You'd want some 970 or higher chipset board. VRM cooling and configuration determine how much wattage you can run the CPU at safely without blowing up the board.

While we're talking overclocking, I'm wondering if lower p-states will still be available for overclocking?

For fm2+ I was able to OC the boost clock only. Can this be done in AM4 as well? I'm contemplating Ryzen 1600 build, but want it to more closely match 1600x for sparse thread.

Back to original OP topic, re cooling; I also think the 212 EVO is a very good bet. Water cooling is silly unless you've got a board that can run the FX-9000 high wattage series.

 

[Arshad Hussain]

What motherboard are you using? is it full ATX or mATX? secondly, what is your budget for the cooler?

 

[DrMrLordX]

For fm2+ I was able to OC the boost clock only. Can this be done in AM4 as well? I'm contemplating Ryzen 1600 build, but want it to more closely match 1600x for sparse thread.

You can do p-state OC with AM4 if you like. Board has to support it though. I think?

 

[amd6502]

You can do p-state OC with AM4 if you like. Board has to support it though. I think?

Thanks for the pointer! Unless the motherbird has the firmware to drive p-state OCing this looks a bit complicated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6v9e7d/any_guides_on_pstate_overclocking_on_ryzen/

From reddit user dr13st

Not true. I have it working on an Asus Prime x370 Pro. P-States are configured in the CPU via MSRs, so it should not depend on the mainboard.it working on an Asus Prime x370 Pro. P-States are configured in the CPU via MSRs, so it should not depend on the mainboard.

....

If you want to configure p-states on Linux you could use the msr device [1] to read/write the configuration you want from a simple shell script. See page 138 in the AMD reference manual [2] for how to configure it. Just don't fuck it up, or you have a (moderately) expensive brick instead of a cpu 😉.

[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/msr.4.html

[2] https://support.amd.com/TechDocs/54945_PPR_Family_17h_Models_00h-0Fh.pdf

 

[DrMrLordX]

Huh, last I heard, people were doing it from the UEFI rather than using MSR tweakers, but hey what do I know.

 

[amd6502]

thanks again for the good info, i'll look into this

 

[HotJob]

Update on my FX-6300 overclock to give Original Poster some tips.
I got my CPU to 4.284 Ghz. I was trying to overclock my memory using the front side bus (FSB,usually 200Mhz on AMD boards) when the CPU failed a Prime95 test at 205Mhz FSB. I reduced the multiplier to 20.5x front side bus and retried. Failed again. Might just be the bus frequency, but I knew the memory (2400Mhz at 1866) could take it, so I reduced the FSB to 200. CPU passes at 4.1GHZ I increase the vcore on the cpu to +.040 and raise the FSB to 202. Success! I raise the FSB to 205. Fail. I lower the FSB to 204. Success! I now have my highest stable FSB. I raise the multiplier on the CPU to 21. Success! I now have a 204mhz front side bus with a 21x CPU multiplier, for a total of 4.284Ghz. That voltage increase only raise the maximum CPU temperature 10 degrees, from 43C to 53C. There is no point in Increasing the CPU multiplier to 21.5x, I know that chip can't take a 4.386Ghz overclock, and I like my increased memory speed.