AMD: NB and HT frequency overclocking?

[alkemyst]

I haven't seen much on HT, what I have read is try and get as close to 2100 if you can.

For NB I haven't seen much other than those talking at 3.4-3.6GHz CPU, a NB freq of 2200-2400 is ideal and at 3.6-3.8 moving up to 2600 or so is good.

Anyone have writeups handy / benchmarks on this?

I have a Phenom II x3 720 and 1600/12800 7-7-7-24 DDR3 memory if it matters.

Thanks

 

[richierich1212]

HT is optimal between 2000 & 2200 MHz.
NB as high as you can get stable is best.
What are your clocks, voltages right now?

 

[alkemyst]

3600...2150 on the NB was stable at 3400....I am starting all over as my LS120 was dying and causing random problems (BSOD's and hangs).

 

[Sylvanas]

In running the Farcry 2 benchmark I did some quick and dirty testing a while back and I saw no real difference between 2000mhz and 2600mhz HT, however I did see a 1-2 FPS improvement in min FPS with Unit ID clumping, Iso Flow control etc enable in the BIOS. The data is conflicting, but perhaps the best results were seen when people used this app and discussion from this XS thread and some have seen marked gains in CPU-GPU bandwidth by increasing the HT frequency.

 

[daletkine]

From what I understand the higher CPU freq, NB and HT, the better. No limits - really! So, you'd want to maximize all three, while also maximizing the RAM freq. There was an article on Tom's Hardware about it and I remember reading that increasing NB freq on Phenom II yields the same performance boost as increasing CPU freq MHz to MHz. That's because Phenom II architecture can do a lot better, but is held back by its' slower NB clock. Anyway, on my system I maximized all three. Also, I believe that giving up 50MHz on CPU clock for 150MHz in NB clock is a good trade off. Keep in mind that NB clock is what on the Intel side is called the 'un-core' clock, which controls the memory controller. So by increasing the NB clock, you are increasing the performance of the memory controller, thus increasing performance of the memory (even if memory clock is the same).

As for HT, I don't believe that HT is the limiting factor for Phenom II in single or dual-threaded tasks. Only in heavily multithreaded tasks with heavy utilization of drives in the system will HT be overloaded. Still it's nice to keep it as high as possible.