First overclock, need advice.

[Raijian]

I just got my cpu cooler installed and have successfully overclocked to 3.7 ghz and everything is running smoothly. I'm wondering if I can bump this up any further and if these temps and voltages look okay. I'm still learning but I thought maybe if somebody saw something out of the ordinary, some advice might be in order.


I actually didn't do most of this manually, just set the CPU Level up in the Bios to Auto (Don't know how to set it to manual, doesn't show a manual option) and it put it up to 3.7 ghz.

 

[digibucc]

for everyday i try to stay 40c or below, it's "safe" up to about 65c, and some modern chips can actually go higher, but i don't.

 

[Raijian]

In the BIOS I can set my DRam frequency to Auto, which puts it at 800~mhz which is undesirable I would assume, or 1300, 1600, 1900 ish, should I crank it up all the way to the top preset?

Also, running at 3.9ghz as per the bios' CPU Level Up Phenom II X6 3.9 drop down selection. Running at 28 degrees across the board at idle.

Setting the DRam frequency to 1300~mhz in the Bios, according to CPU-Z sets it to 650mhz~.

Am I looking at the wrong numbers? Haha.

 

[digibucc]

nice for the cpu level up (& temp), as for the dram not as high as possible, i would look to see what other people have oc'ed that ram to, and start there and budge up.

 

[Raijian]

Yeah, I don't really know anything about overclocking ram so I'm going to look further into it. I'm sure there's a guide around here somewhere, haha. I just want to make sure I'm getting the max performance out of my stuff.

 

[Raijian]

Update, playing WoW at full graphics to stress test. Sitting in stormwind with shadows and everything cranked as far as it can go, temperatures still reading about 29-30...

Does that sound right? I have both fans active on the cooler, and they're turned up to medium speed.

 

[digibucc]

cpu temps sound good, what about gpu?

 

[Raijian]

35-40 on secondary 45-50 on primary.

those are averages


Edit: All of the issues I've had are gone, so far. No random fps drops for 5-10 seconds steady, no random flashing of colors on my screen.. maybe I had to re-seed everything, maybe my CPU was heating up.. who knows.

Double Edit: Turns out that Crossfirex was disabled. It's the crossfire config that is dropping my FPS randomly, and flashing colors on my screen upon minimizing and closing full screen programs.

I guess double card configs just aren't worth it.

 

[Irony]

I have that same CPU, and it runs very cool. Even overclocked to 4.3, under prime95 stress test it hasn't gotten hotter than 41c

Edit: You said you were stress testing with WOW? If you want to stress test your CPU you should use something like Prime95 which will max out all cores and bring it up to maximum temperatures under load. Some guys like to run it for at least 24 hours to see if the overclock is stable, but I think that if it doesn't crash in an hour or 2 its probably gonna be fine.