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First time overclock. Some questions! (athlon II 640 propus)

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Yes I read a little bit about the phase on this board was only a 4+2. What would you suggest as a safe range on this motherboard when considering voltages/Max fsb without ruining the motherboard.
 
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From what I read that board has a 4+1, not a 4+2 power phase.

What I would suggest would be to pick up a low RPM 50mm spot fan and secure it to the VRM heatsink to blow air across it to cool it. I say low RPM because the fast ones are quite noisy. Get one below about 4000 rpm if you can. I would also put a cooling fan n the backside of the motherboard to cool the socket area. With those measures I think you should be fine and be able to get the most out of your CPU overclock.
 
I have a few 50mm fans laying around here. Which one of these two spots is the VRM heatsink?

or is it the heatsink to the right of my pci-e slots?

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That's a great idea, I also noticed the socket temp was getting a pretty good spread over the core.
 
The VRM heat sink is the one between the socket and the I/O ports at the back edge of the board. If you have extra fans it is not a bad idea to put one on the other heat sink (which is the north bridge sink). I recently did a build with that same motherboard. What works well for attaching the fan on that VRM heat sink is to find two small screws of the right diameter and length that will thread between the sink fins towards each end, one screw at each end. You can use the two screws attach the fan in some way. The way I did it was to stretch a thick rubber band between the two screws I just mentioned and sandwich the fan between the two sides of the rubber band. If you sink the screws so that the heads are lower than the top edge of the fan's frame they will pull downward on the fan to hold it against the heat sink. The ears at the corners of the fan act as retainers.
 
i have a 60mm spot fan that im just going to run at 7v instead of 12v by a molex adapter. Its wayy too loud at 12v. The only problem is Even a 50mm spot fan is having trouble gaining clearance between my CPU heatsink and my rear exhaust fan. hmm...
 
I forget. What CPU cooler are you using? You know, you really need to create a "Sig" so your system info travels with every post. It's a common courtesy. You have a gold star now below your name so you can do that. Trouble is, I can't find the tool. It used to be under Quick Links at the top of the page.

Anyway, yeah, some coolers get in the way of putting a fan on the VRM heatsink. Then put a fan on the backside of the area if you can.

Oh, Sig creation tool is under Forum Actions/Edit Profile. Look down the far left hand column.
 
Alright, i have a low profile fan that i can strap to the back. oh and thanks for the tip. i totally forgot about my sig! Thanks for the help everyone tho. I wasnt able to get above 3400mhz until i asked for some help ;)
 
well you see.... im just a novice and im still working my way up to 3600mhz.... finally got computer to boot at 3600mhz fsb heh...not much. Im going to run prime95 and see how it goes.
Edit: Instant lockup then proceeded by bluescreen when running prime95...
Untitled.png
 
But look how low your vcore still is. Man, you've got to jack that up. That's been said before. What's holding you back? Not temps.
 
So i got my Vcore to properly set to 1.41v. Here is my HWMonitor screencap after prime95 20 minutes in.
 
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Just make sure the attachments aren't in the bottom row of the window and checked in the box. New uploads should appear on their own in that bottom row.
 
If you go to the post in question and click on Edit and then click on Go Advanced in the edit window you should be able to remove any attachments from previous posts.

Well, not that you upped your vcore it looks like you're getting some good results. A lot of those Propus chips maxed out the overclock at about 3.6, at least on reasonable voltage. Depends too on the how good the motherboard is. And the unknown here is how much wattage your motherboard will stand before becoming the source of instability itself. We would not be asking this question if you had a Sabertooth.

Passing two hours of the Prime95 blend test will pretty well ensure that your overclock is stable. Twenty minutes only establishes tentative stability.
 
Alright thanks guys. I managed to run prime95 for 4~ ish hours a few days ago with temps never reaching higher than 50c socket temp at 3.5ghz. Core temps never went over 40c. I did a run at 3.6ghz~ but the socket temp was reaching about 57c and that just seemed too much for me. The physical heat the VRM was producing also just seemed way to hot for my liking. Im going to keep it at 3.5 until I snag up a new motherboard. Do you have any advice for a am3+ socket motherboard with decent VRM cooling and a 8+2 power phase?
 
Alright. Also, the board doesnt have to be a cheap am3+ board. I prefer quality over quick and cheap. I presumably am going to be building a liquid cooled intel rig end of december and will probably pick up a sabertooth board for that.
 
Trolllyy, if you are going water Intel, you will see better benchmarks if you build big enough and you will not even want to fool around with lesser 4 core AMD cpu. However that board is not the cheapest board by any means. And it should do fairly well even if you did go FX processor with enough cpu cooling. I just meant that the top two Asus mobos the Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 and the CHV-z are what I would have for full on pushing an 8 core FX processor. And you have to overclock the FX series to not give away all the performance to Intel cpus. Overclock FX AMD to close the gap on similar Intel cpu rigs.
RGone...
 
So, I'm confused now. Trollyy, are you wanting to build a higher end AM3+ system now and then a high end Intel rig towards the end of December?
 
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