I'm a CPU Overclocking noob, please help!

[Blitzvogel]

Ok, well today I bought myself an early Christmas gift in the form of a Cooler Master H60 liquid cooling system for my CPU, with the serious intention of overclocking my Phenom II x4 925 to give it a bit more performance until I build a new system same time next year. It's installed and humming away nicely :awe:

My mobo has plenty of BIOS options in regards to setting up an OC, and for the past few days I've had everything all nice and dandy at ~3.1 GHz, and outside of the base CPU speed setting and the memory speed ratio, I had not messed with anything else. So now, feeling dangerously over-empowered, and after a bit of research, I want to push my Phenom close to about 3.8 GHz. It seemed a logical goal from what I was able to gather from the interwebs. Of course, I figured an overvolt would be necessary from previous misadventures in OCing, and 1.5v seemed about what would be needed.......Ok,, since messing with the base CPU speed (is it the FSB?) messes with the northbridge, should I leave the NB values alone or should I readjust them back to something closer to default? I know the NB has it's own voltage settings too. My mobo (MSI 770-C45 AM3) has plenty of "Auto" selections everywhere when it comes to speed and voltage and I'm just looking for a bit of guidance, because something else being changed just increases the chance for the OC to fail. Even my more "shallow" attempts, like 3.3 GHz have failed with and without voltage bumps. Maybe someone with a Phenom II x4 925 (Stepping 2, revision RB-C2 if it helps) has some specific values to try? :hmm:

Thanks in advance.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

3.8 may be a bit optimistic. I just picked up a Phenom ii x4 830 which is, as far as opinions go, identical to your cpu. I've had it up around 3.6 stable with some voltage but I'm comfy leaving it at 3.4 on stock voltages. Lets see if we can get you there.

I'm assuming you've looked at the how to guides and are running Prime (or something) to test. Also keeping an eye on temps. I'm a believer in first finding an oc value on locked multiplier cpus using just fsb. It tells me where something is no longer keeping up. Then I start tweaking other values one at a time usually starting with limiting memory speeds.

My suggestion is to leave everything at stock values except for FSB. I see in your sig 3.1 so that should be a fsb around 220. Try to up only fsb to 230 and let us know if it survives bench testing.