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3 Step Guide to Overclock Your AMD Phenom

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This guide will teach you how to properly overclock your Phenom II, and squeeze out every last drop that the CPU has to offer. It has been a very long road with this guide. Most of you that have been around the forums know about "Dolk's guide" if you have ever wondered into the AMD section. Otherwise, maybe you’ve heard of it from the references across other enthusiast forums who link back to Overclockers.com for the instructions. The guide has had many re-writes to update details or add more in-depth information about CPUs in general. After a long time of re-writing and waiting on AMD to push out all of their CPUs, I want to share with the community the final guide for the Phenom II CPUs.

... Return to article to continue reading.
 
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Thank you a lot for putting this together Dolk. I followed it when overclocking two quad cores (965BE and 975BE) as well as a thuban (1090T BE)... It was genuinely very helpful.

Most everything you stated held accurate, although when really pushing things for benchmarking I played around with memory timings a lot more, and I also found a higher CPU-NB would help some of my benchmark scores. SuperPi specifically on the 1090T, I would get higher efficiency on my scores if I got the CPU as high as it would go, then also raised the CPU-NB to its limits, then also use CPU tweaker to lower memory subtimings...

It took a lot of tweaking for me to put up competitive scores on hwbot.org, but your guide was the baseline I started from. Some of the "rules" or guidelines can be bent when you get to a certain point and you understand what you are doing, but they are valuable in learning how these chips operate.

Thanks again! And thanks to the other folks who chipped in on reviewing and editing this, I know a lot of hands helped trim this down as much as possible while still hitting the important points.
 
Just to give an idea of how much was trimmed down. The original Guide that I created is about 50 pages long. This one is about 12 pages.

Hope you guys enjoy the new guide. There have been a lot of additional information added that pertains to the Thubans, so I suggest checking that out.
 
Cracking article! This will surely become one of the staple go-to guides for AMD overclocking.

Nice work, Dolk!
 
Great work Dolk!

Before this was published, I used this as my bible for getting a feel when I finally got an AMD platform chip. This was extremely helpful. It will be a great resource for n00bs and experts alike.

Matt
 
Good stuff - happy to finally see it on the Front Page! :beer: :beer: :beer:


One minor thing. When you talked about stock settings you have "NB Voltage = 1.1 V". It should probably be noted that's for the FX chipset (and many other non-graphics chipsets) but not necessarily all of them. IIRC, AMD's IGP chipsets need 1.3v for the NB voltage? Like I said, minor, but something people who don't know may question. ;)
 
I know the 7xx IGP chipsets (not sure on 785) are all 1.3v.
No clue on 8xx.
 
Almost?

It goes to google. It doesnt work. ;)

It is a google query link, it works as designed. A google for dolks guide puts his forum thread at the top... His thread gets traffic from people using that keyword in google on a regular basis ("dolks guide").
 
So you put alink there for someone to have to type it in instead of a direct link? I dont get that but ok.
 
The link works in the article, I just clicked the one in the forum here and its' broken - that is the discrepancy - click the link in the actual article and you will see what I was talking about. I now see what you are talking about with the forum link not working.
 
I grabbed the stock NBv from the Thermal, and Voltage white papers that AMD released.

BTW, My ego is now 10x bigger, now that I know people search "Dolk's Guide" in google :D
 
I grabbed the stock NBv from the Thermal, and Voltage white papers that AMD released.
For non-IGP chipsets, yes, but what about the IGP chipsets like the 890GX, 790GX, and so on down the list?

If nothing else maybe you should specify the chipset(s) you're referencing.

Is that even possible :confused:
LOL! I had the same thought when I read that!
 
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He already listed they were guidelines, and if further information is needed it can be referenced from the document he linked to. If we include every cumbersome detail directly, the guide would be back up to the 50 pages it started at - an avalanche of information can hurt more than it helps.
 
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