AMD Overclocking Guide

Discussion in 'Processors and motherboards AMD' started by Psychlone, Jul 18, 2008.

  1. Lavcat

    Lavcat Master Guru

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    What is your NB speed? If the HT is higher than the NB the machine won't work.

    Be grateful that the BIOS recovery option worked! As I get older the CMOS jumper gets harder and harder to find.
     
  2. deefop

    deefop Member Guru

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    CPU/NB frequency is 840mhz. HT link speed is 210mhz. I still have no idea why it won't work... i've been experimenting to figure it out but nothing fixes it :(
    granted I could go back to default settings or even my original overclock but that would seem like a wimpy way to go about things
     
  3. deefop

    deefop Member Guru

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    As an additional question regarding this whole process:

    What is the point of finding your motherboards maximums for these various settings? I mean, the guide says he discovered a maximum FSB speed of 286, but he only uses 210 in his overclock. And correct me if I'm wrong but you would never be able to be stable or even post your system if you found the maximums of those settings and tried to use them all at once, right? Don't they all need to be lowered quite significantly before your system will have a chance of booting?
     
  4. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    You're underclocking too far which is prob why it won't boot. 210 HT is really low.

    What minimum settings really means is start at stock/default settings, and go from there...

    Anyway that aside, your best bet is to OC the CPU/NB to 2500-2600mhz or more, that's gonna give you the biggest increase in performance.


    At 1600mhz your memory is running plenty fast enough, pushing it further won't help a whole lot.
    In fact lowering the memclock and tightening up the timings will do the same thing...
     

  5. naike

    naike Ancient Guru

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    Yeah, but AMD (at least most) systems prefer tighter timings to higher memory clock.
     
  6. deefop

    deefop Member Guru

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    I really wished I had understood that minimum really meant "stock". Would have saved me a lot of confusion!
    As far as the memory goes... If I wanted to OC it how would I go about that? I'm still curious that you see motherboards which they say support memory at speeds like "1866(OC) and things like that. Do you just increase the DRAM frequency and then up the voltage to stabalize it? If I overclocked the RAM stable wouldn't that also help me achieve a faster overclock of the CPU? And couldn't I then also tighten up the timings which would give me the best of both worlds? Or am I being too optimistic?
     
  7. IcE

    IcE Don Snow

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    What does Channel Interleaving do out of curiosity? Why set it to 20:16,9 for all four DIMM's filled?
     
  8. deefop

    deefop Member Guru

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    How does increasing your northbridge speed increase performance? And is there every any point where you should consider increasing the HT link as well? They both default to 2000mhz on my system but i'm wondering if bumping them would be worth it, since I can't seem to get my CPU stable at anything over 3.7ghz
     
  9. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    I don't know the technicalities of it, I just know that it does (though your NB is directly related to your GPU and RAM, if that helps).
    Increasing your HT link over 2000mhz won't help any though...
     
  10. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    It splits your ram up into sections which enables multiple r/w at the same time..
    Kind of like how unganging works with L2 cache on multi-core cpu's - the L2 can multi-task..so to speak.


    Lousy explanation I know...:)

    I'll upload some benchmarks for you when I get home so you can see the difference...

    FWIW - on my board with 2x 2GB sticks, 12bits is fastest...
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2011

  11. deefop

    deefop Member Guru

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    So... is it faster for gaming to have your RAM at 1600mhz and tighten the timings as much as possible or to drop it to 1333mhz and tighten the timings even more? I would assume for gaming the faster the frequency the better
     
  12. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    Same difference really...if you need to drop your RAM to 1333mhz in order to raise your NB, then my advice is go ahead and do it.
     
  13. nikitash

    nikitash Banned

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    Tighter timing to your AMD based processor will do more good than harm rather than having high speed ram 1600 mhz with loose timings which will degrade both cpu life and ram life. Intel cpu need bandwidth speed rather than timings.
     
  14. Psychlone

    Psychlone Ancient Guru

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    ^ IT does depend on the architecture of the processor and chipset though...
    I personally have found higher gains (in game benchmarks) with higher MHz on the RAM than tighter timings, but obviously the best choice would be a combination of the two.

    Raise your FSB to increase your RAM's throughput until you're happy with it's speed, THEN tighten it's timings as much as possible.

    Best of BOTH worlds!


    Psychlone
     
  15. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    ^What he said..:)


    This is the result of a bench test I ran on my rig 2 days ago, to help explain something to another member...

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     

  16. cupper24

    cupper24 Guest

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    I'll go ahead and second Psychlone and Pill Monster... Raise the ceiling as high as you can speed-wise. If you are following the guide properly, you will find that ceiling at very loose timings. You'll begin to tighten your timings one-by-one, increment-by-increment and you'll eventually hit a point where you either won't POST, or you'll throw errors on whatever program you're using (i.e., Prime95). Go back up a notch on that memory setting, and you should be good. Wash, rinse, repeat for the other memory timings. This is the most tedious part of the overclock. Stabilizing voltages and finding the max speed for the CPU is the fun part.

    But, this IS the step that brings it all together, and following the aforementioned methodology will give you the best mix of speed and tight timings, with the emphasis being put where it should be... on speed. In my experience as well, tight timings never substituted for raw speed. But again, you really are getting the best of the balance finding your speed ceiling and then tightening your RAM timings.
     
  17. Dublin_Gunner

    Dublin_Gunner Ancient Guru

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    Tighter timings matter a hell of a lot more with lower bandwidth ram - i.e back in A64 DDR days.

    Nikitash - you're talking old school. Intel & AMD are more similar now due to both having the mem controller on die.

    TBH unless you're doing ram benchmarks, upping the speed & dropping the timings really won't alter performance much, if at all.

    Get your ram to a nice decent speed without pushing it too far, and leave it there.

    But always check what you can get out of the divider - and NEVER sacrifice CPU speed to get an extra few Mhz on the ram. CPU speed is, and always has been king for performance.

    i.e if I could have 3.6Ghz CPU & 1800Mhz ram, or 3.8Ghz CPU and 1600Mhz ram, I'd always say choose the latter :)
     
  18. cupper24

    cupper24 Guest

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    Completely disagree... The bulk of my overclocking experience comes from those days, and myself and few other regulars around the forums rigorously tested the differences between tight timings and RAM speed. For synthetic benchmarks, the results favored tight timings in some cases (very few), but pure speed with optimized timings always beat out tighter timings with lower RAM speeds in real-world performance (particularly gaming, which is where my primary interests were at the time...)

    Of course all set-ups are different, so this is just my opinion backed by extensive experience.

    cupper24
     
  19. Dublin_Gunner

    Dublin_Gunner Ancient Guru

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    Tighter timings and sacrificing a bit of bandwidth nearly always gave better results, on AMD platforms anyway (back then the IMC gave the chip all the bandwidth it needed, the CPU's couldn't utilise much more as this wasn't the main system bottleneck).

    Things were slightly different on Pentium 4, which was starved of memory bandwidth, so I'd agree with you if it was Intel's platform you're referring to.
     
  20. rub73

    rub73 Guest

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    AMD Athlon II x2 270 at 3910 Mhz

    Hello guys,

    I am new in the forum and I come here to share my overclocking with you of the AMD Athlon II x2 270 3400 MHz (Stock speed), and get some advise if it’s not too much to ask, please.

    I could take it safely stabled up to 240, when I got to 4165 but the resulting Ht Link was below the 2000Mhz (at 1920) and I wanted to get to attain the 2000Mhz. Then I increased the overclock to the 245, that would already make an incredible increase of 45 mhz FSB for such a budget processor, but it gave a blue screen shortly after Prime95 started.

    Prime gave me this in the results txt:
    Cannot initialize FFT code, errcode=1005
    Unable to allocate memory. One possible cause is the operating system's swap area is too small

    I tried raising the Vcore slowly from 1.440 up to 1.50 but with no success and I didn’t want to go any further.

    I must say that the overclock was very well stabled up to 240 bus speed, although I can’t prove with any picture of Prime95, because I went ahead to 250. But I do have the prime95 pics for the 230 where I finally left it, due to the fact that I wanted the HT link over 2000 Mhz and not below as it was the case over 233 mhz. Besides, there was no difference noticed whit the system very loaded.

    And here I want o ask you a question, what would it be a better set up: 240 FSB at 4080 Mhz with HT LINK at 1920 or the actual 230 at 3910 with the HT Link at 2070? This really confuses me, since I don’t know if bein below 2000 stock is better or worse than being above up o 2100.

    Said this, and as the Athlon II x2 270 has a 17 multiplier, I took it safely to 4080 Mhz Core Speed (pictures will follow, of course) and 1920 Mhz HT Link.

    But, as said before due to my own choice I left it in 230 bus speed that gives me the 3910 Core Speed with 2070 Mhz of HT Link. I could get it to 232 which would give still 2088 HT Link, but I like round numbers and I decided to stay at 230.

    I must say also, and I think this could be somewhat helpful for you who are reading this, that from the 200 Mhz stock bus speed up to the 230, I made the increase by a number of five, meaning 205, 210, 215 and s on. From 230 on I did the increase one by one, meaning 231,232,233, etc., except for the 250, when I passed directly from 240 to 245. I guess the blue screen has to be with memory issues, this is why I will leave here some pics for you to see how my memory timings are at this very moment.

    Well, I leave you with my system specs and the pictures.

    Motherboard: ASUS M5A88-V EVO
    CPU: AMD Athlon II x2 270 3910 Mhz, overclocked with stock Fan
    Memory:2 x 4 Gbs Kingston 1333 MHz (KVR1333D3N9)
    PSU: ANTEC 650W EARTHWATTS
    HDD: Hitachi IDE 320GB (I’m sure that with a SATA I could have gotten better results on the overclocking, but that will come)
    Chassis fans: 4 x 120 mm (1 in the back (connected to the mobo) taking the heat out of the PC, 1 in front (for HDD)), and 2 on the left side facing the mother board, these three connected to the PSU by molex). Those 3 used as intake fans.

    http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/7236/230prime95silentrearfano.jpg

    http://img806.imageshack.us/img806/5464/230prime95silentrearfan.jpg

    http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/5464/230prime95silentrearfan.jpg

    http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/5464/230prime95silentrearfan.jpg

    Could you please tell me what I am doing wrong to get this blue screen at 245. I am sure I can go well ahead of that. But I am missing something.

    Regards.
     

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