AMD gurus - advice please

[dkm777]

So I powered up my Phenom II 980 rig yesterday, everything works fine. Now I'm itching to overclock it 😀. I read a few guides and i think I have a good idea of the whole process, but I couldn't find anything about safe temperatures and voltages. I'm using a Corsair H60 and at stock speed the reported CPU temp is 45 deg. C and the hottest core is 49 deg.C. That is very cool compared to other systems I played around with. Voltage under load as reported by CPU-Z is ~1.34V.

Edit: the temps are under load (OCCT).

 

[KingFatty]

Do it - what motherboard, is it overclock-friendly?

 

[Vic Vega]

...

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

Start by bumping the multiplier up to 4.0 Ghz and the voltage to 1.4V.

If that isn't stable put the voltage at 1.45V.

Once you have your overclock stable you will want to overclock the HT link speed to 2.6Ghz or 2.8Ghz.

Idle temps don't matter at all. Just make sure you don't go over 62C at full load.

Safe voltage tops out at 1.45V. 1.5V is a little dangerous.

 

[dkm777]

Are those loaded temps?

My 965 @ 4.1GHz idles low to mid thirties and loads mid to upper forties.

If I leave the box sit overnight it will hit high twenties idle.

Yes, that is load temp. I was using OCCT CPU for that.

 

[dkm777]

Bump with status update:

Raised CPU-NB to 2600MHz and cores to 4GHz. My Sabertooth 990FX does not have a fine grained enough offset voltage control, so in order not to go over 1.45V I had to reduce load line calibration to 25%. Now CPU-Z reports Vcore at 1.452V under Prime95 "blend". The temps, however, get really out of hand - I started Prime first thing in the morning and when I checked the temps before leaving for work after almost an hour the cores were at 59 degrees C. The rad was really hot and my Be Quiet SilentWings PURE 1350RPM fan is definitely not enough to push air through it. I'm now thinking of getting a pair of 1850RPM Gentle Typhoons for push-pull. I also tried 4.1 and 4.2 GHz and the later requires way too much voltage (ran a short test at 1.48V and quickly got an error on one core) while the former generates more heat than my H60 can cope with. I think I'm staying at 4GHz.

 

[dkm777]

OK, another bump. It looks like overclocking with all RAM slots populated is really luck of the draw. It's impossible to do that on my chip. Now that I removed two sticks I'm finally on the road to make my system completely stable@4GHz or thereabouts. And the weirdest thing - overclocking by "bus speed" gives me not only a subjectively snappier performance, but lower temps as well. Also through trial and error I found that my chip really, really doesn't like temps above 50 degrees C.