FX 6300 + M5A99X EVO R2.0 Overclock Blog...Guide...thing...

kruppsy

Master
As you can see in my sig I have recently put together an AMD build. I won't linger on the ins and outs of that too much as PCS will probably get annoyed. But what Im planning to do is try and see what the components I have (see title), also available from PCS, can achieve with regards to overclocking and how it affects performance in gaming.

I started by looking around online for guides myself but didn't have a great deal to go on, so, in the end, copied the settings of someone else. This basically involved changing all the 'DIGI+ Power' BIOS settings to 'Extreme' and altering the multiplier. It worked to a point but once I'd got to 4.6Ghz, hit a brick wall. Its then I realised I needed to start again from scratch, research my components and do some benchmarks so I can at least see if there's any improvements. Im mainly benching games as, well, its a gaming rig primarily so it seemed to make most sense. There is quite a lot of belief that overclocking doesn't really affect gaming so this its another thing I wanted to see for myself.

My rig is exactly what you see in my sig, the only things not listed are that I have a 650W Coolermaster Bronze PSU and Im on Windows 8 (not sure that matters though).

So, to start things off. On entering BIOS, I hit F5 which is for 'Optimised Defaults', then manually changed the DRAM settings to the manufacturers recommended (Mhz, timings & voltage), as 'Auto' rarely gets it correct. That is it, I left everything else as is. This gives me a CPU-Z which looks something like this:

defaults_cpuz.JPG

I then run some benchmarks. I will give scores/fps and the max temp of the CPU during the test to see what's going on.

3DMark :

Ice Storm - 96173
Cloud Gate - 12752
FireStrike - 5473

Max temp 41C

Just Cause 2 - Urban Jungle Benchmark :

JustCause2-defaultcpu.jpg

Ave fps 39.26

Max temp 38C

Metro 2033 :

metro2033benchmarksettings.JPG

metro2033-defaultcpu.JPG

Ave fps 42.5

Max temp 41C

Tomb Raider - Ultimate preset - TressFX on :

TR-Ultimate-defaultcpu.jpg

Ave fps 51.4

Max temp 36C

Over the coming weeks, I will be aiming for a 4.7Ghz overclock which I will be testing for stability with OCCT and Prime. It is right at the top end of what can be done with air cooling but I am hopeful I can get there. I will update this thread with Bios settings and comparative benches once I achieve the highest clock I can. Bear In mind Im easily distracted by playing games so Im not going to put a time frame on it for now.

Thanks for reading a...at this stage...largly pointless thread :)
 

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
I auto OC'd mine and got straight to 4.5GHz no problems, and if I go to extreme I get 4.8GHz. Why don't you just do this, yours should clock a bit higher seeing as it has less cores
 

kruppsy

Master
I auto OC'd mine and got straight to 4.5GHz no problems, and if I go to extreme I get 4.8GHz. Why don't you just do this, yours should clock a bit higher seeing as it has less cores

What board do you have dude? I did try Auto, got to 4.25 and 4.45Ghz using the two presets, so discounted that straight away. Maybe I did something wrong? Anyway, tbh I like getting my hands dirty doing it manually, it's quite interesting, slow, but interesting. Yes I'm sad. :)
 

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
I have the same board as you, not sure if its R2.0 or the first version though.

Well have fun with that I can't be bothered to keep rebooting it was much easier doing it automatically.

I've kept mine at 4.5GHz because it was getting quite hot at 4.8GHz and wasn't clocking down automatically when it was idle
 
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