Bulldozer Overclocking Questions

crazymonkeyzero

Senior member
Feb 25, 2012
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I have never overclocked and thought now was good a time as ever to start. ^_^ Just curious, how much would I approximately be able to overclock the FX8150 (which is claimed to be unlocked by AMD) using the corsair h60 liquid cooling and the Asus Sabertooth 990fx with a 520w Seasonic psu so it would be very stable...by stable I mean being able to run prime 95 large ffts for 12 hours. Will overclocking significantly reduce the life of a mobo or cpu, if it is run at that speed for extended periods of time? I know every cpu and mobo and setup varies, but I was hoping for a rough ballpark. Also, is it possible to overclock just the CPU while keeping the memory constant? Thanks in advance for any advice or comments!
 

Rvenger

Elite Member <br> Super Moderator <br> Video Cards
Apr 6, 2004
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What graphics card are you running? Be careful, Bulldozer loves to drink the juice when overclocked beyond 4.5ghz. If you are running a higher end videocard, I would get a bigger PSU.
 

crazymonkeyzero

Senior member
Feb 25, 2012
363
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What graphics card are you running? Be careful, Bulldozer loves to drink the juice when overclocked beyond 4.5ghz. If you are running a higher end videocard, I would get a bigger PSU.

This is actually fora a workstation build for computational jobs, so I never bought a gaming card; the graphics card is a 50$ EVGA GT 520.
 

crazymonkeyzero

Senior member
Feb 25, 2012
363
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Overclocking itself won't shorten the life expectancy of a CPU. Overvolting will, though.

This may seem like a noob question but do I need to over volt, or overvolt considerably to overclock? I was hoping to be able to run my 3.6ghz stock fx8150 at 4.4-4.5ghz on all cores 24/7 with the h60.
 

Dravic

Senior member
May 18, 2000
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you should be able to get to 4.5-4.6 ghz easily, every 100mhz after that is pretty tough for all air and self contained water coolers coolers. It just starts putting out a LOT of heat with every little voltage increase.