Overclocking my phenom 955...Need guidance

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AcesTranquility

Member
Jul 29, 2009
56
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Hi,

Yesterday i reached a stable clock speed of 3.6ghz @ 1.47v .

But tonight i want to get my 955 to 3.8ghz with a temp of around 55 when under full load.
Right now i have my CPU at clock speeds - 3.2ghz @ 1.35v... I do know how to overclock and increase voltages but i am still a newbie to CPU overclocking and need help off you overclocking freaks.

Firstly i was wondering if you clear a few things up for me then i can move on...
At the moment i when i run prime95 with the stock CPU clocks, i get around 54c after running the test for about 20mins after 20 mins it hangs around that temp (the longest iv tested is 40mins and all temps are below 52c, even after 40 mins they can drop down to 51c). Here are some questions i hope you can answer...

1. If i run a stress test for say 5hours as apposed to the 40mins will i see any kind of temp increase? in other words after about 40mins is that the peak temps or do they go higer as time goes on?

2. I know amd say the max temp for a 955 is 62c, would i be ok at those temps? or should i stick to around 55c (when stress tested)?

3. If i overclock my CPU from 3.2ghz to 3.8ghz what kind of frames per second increase will i see?

4. yesterday when i bumped it up to 3.7ghz and then ran prime95 my system got the blue screen... what do i need to do to make it more stable? or does the fact that it conked out at 3.7 mean that, that is the limit?

5. I understand that prime95 pushes the CUP to its MAX, but if i were to play crysis maxed out with a fps of say 35, would be this as hard on the CPU as prime95?

Please forgive any wording mistakes, its 2:10am in england.

I cant explain how greatful i would if you guys could help me reach my target tonight! I would be very very very happy!

thank you
 
I

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,110
64
91
Originally posted by: AcesTranquility
what could i change to bring temps down/increase stability?

thanks
Click to expand...

To bring temps down using the same hardware will require you to lower the voltages and/or the clockspeed. Physics is in your way here.

If you want to keep clockspeed and/or raise voltage to hit stability while keeping same or cooler temps then you need a better cpu cooling solution.

Checkout Frostytech and their rankings of AMD HSF solutions: http://www.frostytech.com/top5heatsinks.cfm#AMDHEATSINK
 
lopri

lopri

Elite Member
Jul 27, 2002
13,327
708
126
Originally posted by: AcesTranquility
1. If i run a stress test for say 5hours as apposed to the 40mins will i see any kind of temp increase? in other words after about 40mins is that the peak temps or do they go higer as time goes on?

2. I know amd say the max temp for a 955 is 62c, would i be ok at those temps? or should i stick to around 55c (when stress tested)?

3. If i overclock my CPU from 3.2ghz to 3.8ghz what kind of frames per second increase will i see?

4. yesterday when i bumped it up to 3.7ghz and then ran prime95 my system got the blue screen... what do i need to do to make it more stable? or does the fact that it conked out at 3.7 mean that, that is the limit?

5. I understand that prime95 pushes the CUP to its MAX, but if i were to play crysis maxed out with a fps of say 35, would be this as hard on the CPU as prime95?

Please forgive any wording mistakes, its 2:10am in england.

I cant explain how greatful i would if you guys could help me reach my target tonight! I would be very very very happy!

thank you
Click to expand...
1. No, as long as ambient temperature remains the same.

2. You will be OK w/ max temp of 62C, but you will be better w/ lower temps.

3. Probably very little, if anything.

4. Better cooling, higher voltages, loosening memory dividers or reducing the number of memory sticks, etc.

5. It is difficult to compare Prim95 and Crysis as individual stress testings. You should see them as complimenting each other. Crysis may not stress CPU the way Prime does, but it stresses the system's vital traffics - including PCI Express and HyperTransport. Since games are probably one of the most taxing applications on a desktop system, what good does a CPU do if it can't handle them?

I saw from your screenshot that you're clocking via AOD. With the 955BE, raising multipliers within Windows will lower its max overclock. There are parameters that are set when the system boots (and do not change with multipliers in Windows), and because of that overclocking in Windows is more difficult, except maybe for screenshots. However you can have a better performance that way, too.

First thing I'd suggest is to find the max overclock without changing voltages. If your board changes voltages automatically, manually set at the stock value which is 1.35V for the 955BE. Raise the multiplier in the BIOS gradually and see how it goes. 1.47V is somewhat high for a 955BE @3.6GHz.

What is your motherboard?
 
S

ShawnD1

Lifer
May 24, 2003
15,987
2
81
Originally posted by: lopri
First thing I'd suggest is to find the max overclock without changing voltages. If your board changes voltages automatically, manually set at the stock value which is 1.35V for the 955BE. Raise the multiplier in the BIOS gradually and see how it goes. 1.47V is somewhat high for a 955BE @3.6GHz.
Click to expand...
I can understand why you would want to set the voltage in the BIOS, but why not change the multiplier in Windows? That seems like a simple enough process that AMD Overdrive could do it fairly well.

It would probably save a lot of time to set the voltage in the BIOS as suggested then change the CPU multiplier in Windows every 10 minutes while Prime is running. Use the small FFT test; it seems to crash my computers faster and raise the CPU temperature higher than the other tests. Also, don't screw with anything else. Use stock HT speed, stock HT voltage, stock RAM speed, stock everything. In your picture it says you changed the north bridge voltage, but you probably won't need to touch that if you're just changing the CPU multiplier.
 
P

paveguts

Junior Member
Sep 13, 2009
1
0
0
My Phenom 955 idles at 55, loaded at 63+/- 2 or 3 and spikes to 71 (once). I run a Nexus HOC-9000 in concert with three nexus 120mm case fans. pretty quiet and stable. As a rule, I don't mess with stock coolers - though AMD has been producing a better product in the last couple of years... I prefer high end ultra quiet gear.

the 955 BE is oc-ed to 3410 --
mobo: Asus M3A78T-E

cpu ratio 17
dram 1333
cpu voltage: 1.6

no problems yet.

Guts
 
Y

Yukmouth

Senior member
Aug 1, 2008
461
0
0
Getting " 3d stable " @ 3.8ghz is easy, games don't stress a CPU like Prime95 dose; in fact there are not many games that can fully use four cores. After all, games need to be sold to work on wide variety of systems, not everyone has top of the line CPU's.

Even video encoding puts less stress on your system than prime 95. In short, your CPU won't be maxed out by *any* of todays available titles in my expeirence.

Try it yourself, you'll see that temps stay considerably lower while gaming than they do in prime 95.

Some phenoms take less voltage than others to get to 3.8ghz and up, the lower your stable vcore, the lower your temps will be.
 
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