Just installed the 960T, nice chip!

[ElFenix]

Lol, well i do keep it quite cold in here. I like it chilly. Also, i was only playing COD 4 multiplayer for about 30 minutes, then rebooted to check. My guess is that it was higher of course during the actual game.

uh, you let it cool off. that's its idle temp.

 

[Ferzerp]

Seriously. Chips cool down within a matter of seconds with the giant hunks of metal that we attach to them....

 

[daveybrat]

Yeah, i'm going to run Prime on it tonight and install HWMonitor to see what it really gets to. Thanks for all the help guys.

The only bad thing about getting back into overclocking is......that now i don't when to stop? LOL

 

[JimmiG]

I always get a bit suspicious when someone reports <45C temps with regular air cooling. Ever since motherboards started coming with temperature monitoring features, I've never had a CPU run below 50C full load..that's what everything since my first Athlon T-Bird 900 MHz have been running at...

 

[daveybrat]

Well, installed the latest version of Hardware Monitor and Prime95. Prime has been running for almost an hour now and the max cpu temps on all 4 cores is 27 Degrees Celcius.

Idle show it at 14-15 Celcius.

I'm also using the 'High Heat' Torture test.

Does that sound accurate?

Wow, you guys aren't kidding, as soon as i hit stop all 4 Workers, my temps just dropped form 27 down to 20 Celcius in about 15 seconds not even.

 

[Termie]

Well, installed the latest version of Hardware Monitor and Prime95. Prime has been running for almost an hour now and the max cpu temps on all 4 cores is 27 Degrees Celcius.

Idle show it at 14-15 Celcius.

I'm also using the 'High Heat' Torture test.

Does that sound accurate?

Wow, you guys aren't kidding, as soon as i hit stop all 4 Workers, my temps just dropped form 27 down to 20 Celcius in about 15 seconds not even.

Holy cow, that's very cool. You have a low ambient temp, but even so, that's very good, and I assume you have some headroom (but I'm no AMD expert).

Have fun!

 

[Towermax]

I just replaced a 125W 940BE with a 960T. Couldn't get the 940BE stable above 3.4 without a lot of volts--which didn't work so well on this AM2+ entry level board.

The 960T is stable at 3.9 (19.5X) with vcore at 1.41, cpu/nb volts up a notch or two, nb speed at 2600. CPU temp at full load runs about 50-51C. Idle is 25C (22C when I use Cool n' Quiet). Chipset temp never goes over 48C. Ambient temperature here in the Southern California desert is 70-75F right now.

Stable, BTW, means 8-10 hours each of Burntest, OCCT, and Prime 95 blend, large FFT, small FFT.

Hyper 212+ on the CPU, Enzotech heatsinks on the MOSFETs, and the thermal compound on mobo heatsinks replaced with Arctic Silver.

I suspect it'll go to 4.0 or even 4.1 without too much trouble, but I've dialed it back to 3.8 at 1.4v, which is more than enough for my uses. I prefer quiet, stability, and longevity to max speed.

The 960T is really a very sweet CPU.

-------------
AMD 960T Zosma, Asus M4A785-M, 4X2GB Corsair XMS2 1066 (running at 800), Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB with AC passive cooler, OZC Vertex 64GB SSD, Hitachi 500GB spinner, Seasonic 560W Gold PSU.

 

[sequoia464]

The 960T is stable at 3.9 (19.5X) with vcore at 1.41, cpu/nb volts up a notch or two, nb speed at 2600. CPU temp at full load runs about 50-51C. Idle is 25C (22C when I use Cool n' Quiet). Chipset temp never goes over 48C. Ambient temperature here in the Southern California desert is 70-75F right now.

Is that with 4 or 6 cores?

 

[Towermax]

Is that with 4 or 6 cores?

That's with 4 cores. It will unlock a fifth core, and maybe the 6th (did it once) but is unstable with more than 4 cores. I suspect it's the AM 2+ motherboard--it's a 125W board and doesn't like being near its max power draw.

I only tried unlocking just to see if it would work--four cores is more than I need--I don't do much gaming or run any CPU-intensive apps.

-------------
AMD 960T Zosma, Asus M4A785-M, 4X2GB Corsair XMS2 1066 (running at 800), Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB with AC passive cooler, OZC Vertex 64GB SSD, Hitachi 500GB spinner, Seasonic 560W Gold PSU.

 

[soccerballtux]

no, it doesn't sound accurate. Take a screenshot with HardwareMon, Speedfan, and Coretemp running alongside prime95 and we might believe you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I always get a bit suspicious when someone reports <45C temps with regular air cooling.

This. My CoreTemp readings for my Q9300 show 34C as the lowest temp, although when I stopped distributed computing for a couple of day, my GPU showed 20C, but my CPU cores showed 45C still. Wierd. Task Manager showed 2% CPU usage.

CoreTemp max is 78C, with a HyperTX2 90mm air cooler, in a Rosewill blackhawk case, with ambients around 65-80F.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

That's with 4 cores. It will unlock a fifth core, and maybe the 6th (did it once) but is unstable with more than 4 cores. I suspect it's the AM 2+ motherboard--it's a 125W board and doesn't like being near its max power draw.

I only tried unlocking just to see if it would work--four cores is more than I need--I don't do much gaming or run any CPU-intensive apps.

-------------
AMD 960T Zosma, Asus M4A785-M, 4X2GB Corsair XMS2 1066 (running at 800), Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB with AC passive cooler, OZC Vertex 64GB SSD, Hitachi 500GB spinner, Seasonic 560W Gold PSU.

I want to say it's more of just your chip just having one (two?) faulty cores. I've got an AM2+ board too, and I ran a 1055t before moving to the 960t. My 1055t took more volts than the 960t to get to 3.8ghz, but I still got it stable.

But what do I know.

 

[Towermax]

I want to say it's more of just your chip just having one (two?) faulty cores. I've got an AM2+ board too, and I ran a 1055t before moving to the 960t. My 1055t took more volts than the 960t to get to 3.8ghz, but I still got it stable.

But what do I know.

I'm not any kind of expert on these chips or boards. This is the first serious overclocking I've done since the 939 days.

And you're probably right--it's not that the board is an AM2+. More likely that the chip has a defective core or two. Still, it would be interesting to test it on a high-end board with more headroom.

-------------
AMD 960T Zosma, Asus M4A785-M, 4X2GB Corsair XMS2 1066 (running at 800), Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB with AC passive cooler, OZC Vertex 64GB SSD, Hitachi 500GB spinner, Seasonic 560W Gold PSU.

 

[svein10]

I want to say it's more of just your chip just having one (two?) faulty cores. I've got an AM2+ board too, and I ran a 1055t before moving to the 960t. My 1055t took more volts than the 960t to get to 3.8ghz, but I still got it stable.

But what do I know.

chubbyfatazn I have a question for you, I also just got this cpu to see if it would oc better than my voltage hungry 940.. Wanted to see if I could get it unlocked, and I have the same board as you have. But I have no success at all, what so ever settings I set in the BIOS (auto, all cores, per core) the ACC will revert back to “disabled”.

What could I be doing wrong, even if the chip has two faulty cores, shouldn’t I be able to se them in the Bios?

Others who might know anything, I would like to know… Thanks.

 

[sm625]

I notice intel chips cool down a lot faster, but still even an amd is 90% cooled off after just a few seconds. You could let it idle for an hour, load it with IBT for an hour, then let it drop back to idle, and within like 3 seconds you will be within a few degrees of your original idle temp. So checking bios after gaming isnt going to tell you much.

 

[Tstorm82]

chubbyfatazn I have a question for you, I also just got this cpu to see if it would oc better than my voltage hungry 940.. Wanted to see if I could get it unlocked, and I have the same board as you have. But I have no success at all, what so ever settings I set in the BIOS (auto, all cores, per core) the ACC will revert back to “disabled”.

What could I be doing wrong, even if the chip has two faulty cores, shouldn’t I be able to se them in the Bios?

Others who might know anything, I would like to know… Thanks.

Have you tried setting the EC Firmware Selection to "hybrid" in the bios?

 

[svein10]

Have you tried setting the EC Firmware Selection to "hybrid" in the bios?

Thanks Tstorm82, yes I did that too.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

chubbyfatazn I have a question for you, I also just got this cpu to see if it would oc better than my voltage hungry 940.. Wanted to see if I could get it unlocked, and I have the same board as you have. But I have no success at all, what so ever settings I set in the BIOS (auto, all cores, per core) the ACC will revert back to “disabled”.

What could I be doing wrong, even if the chip has two faulty cores, shouldn’t I be able to se them in the Bios?

Others who might know anything, I would like to know… Thanks.

Yeah that's one thing I could never figure out with this BIOS... the ACC settings always revert to disabled after you do a complete shutdown.

To unlock mine, I changed all the settings to manual, set the ACC values for the four cores, saved and exited, went back into the BIOS, and all six cores were there. Then I set the settings for the extra two cores, saved and exited, booted to desktop, and CPUz showed all six cores. Once I shutdown though it went back to a four-core setup.

That procedure always worked for me (I assume you're using the F7C BIOS). If you can't get the two extra cores to show up after that, I'd guess your cores really are dead.

 

[svein10]

Yeah that's one thing I could never figure out with this BIOS... the ACC settings always revert to disabled after you do a complete shutdown.

To unlock mine, I changed all the settings to manual, set the ACC values for the four cores, saved and exited, went back into the BIOS, and all six cores were there. Then I set the settings for the extra two cores, saved and exited, booted to desktop, and CPUz showed all six cores. Once I shutdown though it went back to a four-core setup.

That procedure always worked for me (I assume you're using the F7C BIOS). If you can't get the two extra cores to show up after that, I'd guess your cores really are dead.

Thanks a lot chubbyfatazn, I will try this. I am using F7C, and some of the Gigabytes Bios on this board has been a little chuncky...

EDIT: One other little thing, it seems like the temp readings are way to low. On 4 Ghz I am idling 21 c on the cores and 19 on the sensor. I think it should be at least 10 c higher?

EDIT2: What values to set for the ACC?

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Thanks a lot chubbyfatazn, I will try this. I am using F7C, and some of the Gigabytes Bios on this board has been a little chuncky...

EDIT: One other little thing, it seems like the temp readings are way to low. On 4 Ghz I am idling 21 c on the cores and 19 on the sensor. I think it should be at least 10 c higher?

EDIT2: What values to set for the ACC?

Unless you like to keep you room at a balmy ~50F, those readings are wrong. You're using the BIOS for those numbers, right? They should be at least 10C higher, if not more. Go install HWMonitor and see what you get.

I have mine set to 8%. I couldn't squeeze any more out of the chip at 10% or 12%. For unlocking purposes though, it shouldn't matter. At least in my experience.

 

[svein10]

Unless you like to keep you room at a balmy ~50F, those readings are wrong. You're using the BIOS for those numbers, right? They should be at least 10C higher, if not more. Go install HWMonitor and see what you get.

I have mine set to 8%. I couldn't squeeze any more out of the chip at 10% or 12%. For unlocking purposes though, it shouldn't matter. At least in my experience.

Agreed, my office is around 70F. I have tried several including HWMonitor, and all shows the same as the Bios.... Thanks again, I am working on something now so I cant boot to Bios yet and try the ACC. Thanks again!

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Agreed, my office is around 70F. I have tried several including HWMonitor, and all shows the same as the Bios.... Thanks again, I am working on something now so I cant boot to Bios yet and try the ACC. Thanks again!

Oh really? If HWMonitor is also giving you those readings maybe there's something wrong with your sensor. Could always try CoreTemp to see if you get the same results...

Good luck! Even if you can't unlock the two extra cores the 960t itself should be a blast to overclock.

 

[FalseChristian]

I live on the street (yes, I'm a skidrow bum). And I sleep outside (usually under bridges so I can be alone) in any temperature. I haven't eaten in 2 weeks.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

I live on the street (yes, I'm a skidrow bum). And I sleep outside (usually under bridges so I can be alone) in any temperature. I haven't eaten in 2 weeks.

Did you whore yourself out to buy that computer? That's the true sign of an enthusiast.

 

[leper84]

I'm thinking of picking one of these up, two dumb questions-

Would a sabertooth 990fx still have core unlocking?

With a 560ti how much of an improvement would I see over say... a stock clocked e7500?