Is this the wrong CPU

Wow I joined back on '05 and this is my first post, there should be some sort of sleeper award for that. As you can see in the sig, I have a slight bottle neck in gaming, nothing real major I don't think, but it is causing my fps to drop, or that's all I can figure. So when I pieced this machine together I spared nothing except for the CPU, I'm thinking this was a mistake, from some testing I have done, I don't think I can safely go to the FX-9xxx series without going to a larger PSU. In 3d Mark Fire Strike Ultra I'm pulling a nice 673.3in and 615.9out which is about the head room I think I should keep with this PSU if I'm wrong please let know, and that should probably be addressed on another thread I'm sure but the real question is the CPU, the 4350 isn't a bad cpu imo, but it's not enough to fully get the most from my 2 GPU's, or that is my thought, of course you don't always learn this stuff beforehand.

I used some of the information learned form other threads to get a stable OC on the CPU to:



What I'm wondering is if I should go with the FX-8350 or the 8370, not sure how the turbo core goes, will I have more headroom with a stable OC on the xx70 or the xx50, both are 12w TDP so it shouldn't affect power consumption that much, or is this another fallacy I have? Any help would be appreciated, and flaming expected for such a long drown out set of ?'s.

to get the most out of multi GPU you want to go Intel friend.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-scaling-bottleneck,3471-11.html

Data is a bit old, but, 'The Song Remains the Same' with newer hardware.



Now, would a 8 core AMD help stretch those cards legs? Not really, no. Just clockspeed will as the IPC performance of the octo is the same as the quad.

So I Really did screw the pooch by going with this configuration? hmm, this might be the perfect opportunity to build another system seeing how I might just end up with a mobo and cpu laying around with nothing to do. So I guess for what I have in the gpu's to take advantage of them I should just opt for an (insert expletive here) Intel ; ; CPU, would that put this in the wrong thread now? If over clocking is the only thing that will lessen the bottle neck my cpu is causing how much further should I take it to see some noticeable differences. with this cooler, ( I know its a dreaded AiO) I have, I t seems to be doing a decent job keeping things cool would a 4.8 be possible, guess it back to the settings and seeing what I can get.

Thanks for the hard truth I was hopin not to hear, but I thought that might be the probability I was facing of it's the wrong cpu manufacturer to get the most out of the gpu's.

The HWMonitor capture you show does not seem to be under load like we most often suggest of P95 Blend with HWMonitor running in the background to log min/max temps of cpu and package temps. Plus the captures of CPUz > Cpu > Memory > SPD captures. So we can view CPU_NB and HT Link speeds.

Have a good friend that ran FX-8350 in FOUR core mode in his gaming that was heavy cpu oriented and he got by with 2 x 760Gtx video cards and was pleased. His cpu speed though was +4.9Ghz and you have a ways to go to reach that.

Spun the other way around, you can probably buy an i5 Intel cpu and $100 to $135.00 mobo and not plan on any heavy duty overclocks and not be bottlenecked. It just depends on whether you feel like taking any time to try and push the currrent setup toward +4.9Ghz.
RGone...ster.

Yeah, before dropping any more money in a system I wont be able to use much, ill see what I can do with this, ill run the p95 again and take screens with it still running, I thought I did, but I might have messed up somewhere.

t1nm4n << heck man those might be "loaded" temps. I just have looked at so many 8 cores, a few 6 cores and just a sprinkling of 4 cores and that 4 core might have that low of a temp loaded. However do please make sure it was loaded temps and give us also the 3 cpuz tabs > CPU > Memory and SPD along with HWMonitor spread where all voltages and the package temp of cpu are visible. Be a good idea to disable Cool N Quiet and C1/E and C6 and enable HPC and disable APM and windows power mangager set to Performance. That will basically turn off anything dorking with overclock in background.

IF and you nor I are sure, but if those are loaded temps and the voltage to the cpu is no more than it is showing in HWMonitor...we should be able to bump the crap out of 5.0Ghz and you might be okay at least until you can make up your mind how far you want to spend to go Intel.
RGone...ster.

t1nm4n, Unless you paid the money to keep using it, you need to know that HWMonitor Pro is not the way to go. Hey, that's kind of musical isn't it? It will cripple some of it's features after a period of time. We recommend using the non pro version.


What games are you running? Some games cannot take advantage of multiple cores very well and some can. Several of the newer games can efficiently use up to four cores, even more. The thing is the FX series CPUs have cores that share resources so the number of advertised cores is not the number of true cores. In some ways the FX-4350 is really only a dual core and in some ways the FX-83xx series is only a quad core. But still, on games that are well multi-threaded the FX-83xx series should do considerably better than the FX-4350. That motherboar you have will certainly handle the big gun AMD FX-83xx CPUs. But will the PSU? It would be marginal. You might need a 1000W PSU. Lots to think about.

@RGone, I think I know what you mean by loaded temps, and they sorta might be, I don't heat the house to 70 degrees int he winter time, I like it cool, as for the other stuff, its all turned off in the bios, the only thing I did to increase clock was bump the multiplier from 200 > 220, not sure I want to mess with volts and even after reading im not sure which is which, I've read your thread on OC'ing FX processors, still tryin to work through understanding everything. IS 20 min. enough with p95 in blend to get a good idea of temps? It's still running as I write this out, so well see how it does, was running while I cut and cropped the pics also.

So heres what we have after 20min. I also included another HW app that has some more info, or possibly all the info you are looking for in one spot.

@trents, thanks for the heads up on HW pro, never knew that about it, so I guess this is one of those occasions where free is better, I play CoD MW2 ( I know it's old), Crysis 2, Skyrim, Assassins' Creed Revelations (thinking about getting the new one) Sim City and FFXIV. nothing really new, but lookin at other games of course.

Edit: to clarify the room my pc is in stays around 72 ambient while the pc is on, this puppy pumps out some heat. Also I have a temp gun I used to use for RC cars, not sure how accurate it is, but I temped the heat shield on the mem and it is ranging from 85-96 depending on the angle and where I point the temp gun, the Vcores range from 85-110 on the heat pipe Asus has on the formula-z board, are those safe temps? I'm guessing yes.

So reread the The3 BUlldozer overclocking guide, got some useful information from it and comfused on some more of it, but I think I got a better idea of what I should do as for getting more from my cpu. These are loaded temps and ambient in the room is 64f so its nice and chill in here for the aio cooler. there is something you might be able to help me out with, under bios dram timings, anytime I try to set those, system crashes, but it I leave them on (auto) I boot just fine and seem to have a stable OC, matter of fact everything is either disabled or on auto in the bios seems to be the only way I can boot. all I have done was increase fsb to 225 and cpu volt to 1.4 using the AI Suite oc tool, is this wrong of me to use this?



I just opened 3 instances of cpu-z so that I could get all the tabs in one shot, I hope that is acceptable. I did notice on the hwmon pro the cpu utilization is found at the bottom of the program and not in the same place as it is on the free version, so for ease od use I am using the free version. This was @40min of blend torture testing with p95. Again I temped the hatsinks of the mobo and got 85-115 depending on where I pointed the temp gun and the memory heat shield was at 83-96f.

It would be best if you were to make those changes in the BIOS. AISuite can cause issues with stability at times. Yes I see your ram is running slow and my guess is that with 4x4G at 2133 the CPU_NB is being worked pretty hard. Have you added voltage to the CPU_NB yet? I see it's running at nearly 2500. Also with your temps , I can't see why we shouldn't be able to get that quad close to the 5.0 mark.

@Johan45 I figured it would be best to do it from the Bios, but any time I messed with setting there I it wouldn't post ( I believe that's the right term). so I was playing with stuff from Ai suite to test out. I haven't put an OC to anything in 10 years, so like I've read in some other posts on other threads, slow is stable and stable is... well... stable. I guess I want that feeling of stability from a factory clock at something a bit higher, as I was afraid my cpu is the biggest bottle neck in my system.

So when tackling larger clocks from what you can see in the ss's where should I attempt to go from here, lower fsb multiplier and increase memory, how to go about increasing dram is where I think I'm having the hang-ups in the bios, it doesn't seem to want allow the spd settings to work, I will test this some more.

t1nm4n said:

@Johan45 I figured it would be best to do it from the Bios, but any time I messed with setting there I it wouldn't post ( I believe that's the right term). so I was playing with stuff from Ai suite to test out. I haven't put an OC to anything in 10 years, so like I've read in some other posts on other threads, slow is stable and stable is... well... stable. I guess I want that feeling of stability from a factory clock at something a bit higher, as I was afraid my cpu is the biggest bottle neck in my system.

So when tackling larger clocks from what you can see in the ss's where should I attempt to go from here, lower fsb multiplier and increase memory, how to go about increasing dram is where I think I'm having the hang-ups in the bios, it doesn't seem to want allow the spd settings to work, I will test this some more.

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Make your bios changes in small increments and you will have less chance of not being able to post and then having to do a CMOS reset. For example, increase the multiplier in .5x increments and if you are using the FSB to overclock make the increments be 5-10 mhz. This way you should run into the problem of not being able to boot all the way into Windows rather than no post at all.

I was able to get mem to run stable at the xmp value 11-11-11-27 through the bios, but somewhere in there I made a change to something and lost audio, been searching through everything on the bios and can't find a thing pertaining to audio, the only thing I did see was a peg/pci boot preference and I think I messed with that, sometimes I might get to curious. It was pci/peg stock I switched it and I think that's when the audio went out, no clue really, didn't notice the audio not coming in on startup, so I changed it back and audio is still out. I realize this question is now in the wrong thread, but it might be better than starting a new thread.

Sadly, I would point you to Intel. Yes, you spent money on an expensive 990FX board... but is it worth the bottleneck on those two monster cards to stay with AMD? Even with the best AMD FX cpu at 5Ghz you won't get the same performance out of those cards as you would with a Z97 setup.

Lest we forget as well that your cards are at the equivalent of PCIE 3.0 X4/X4 right now due to 990FX's lack of PCIE3.0.

I would suggest that you look into a midrange board, like the ASUS Z97-A or the ASRock Extreme 4, and pick up a 4690K or 4790K, depending on what your "other" workload on your PC involves and whether it would benefit from 8 threads and 2MB of extra cache. Slap your H100i on it, overclock it, and enjoy true, unfettered, unlocked, untied performance, with no bottleneck.

You can still sell that 4350 and CHV for a decent buck in the B.S.T section of this forum or on a local forum in your area.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

As I see it you have two options, 1, get an 8320/50 and overclock it. or 2, get the z97 setup. I like 2 better but it's also multiple times the cost of 1.

t1nm4n said:

I was able to get mem to run stable at the xmp value 11-11-11-27 through the bios, but somewhere in there I made a change to something and lost audio, been searching through everything on the bios and can't find a thing pertaining to audio, the only thing I did see was a peg/pci boot preference and I think I messed with that, sometimes I might get to curious. It was pci/peg stock I switched it and I think that's when the audio went out, no clue really, didn't notice the audio not coming in on startup, so I changed it back and audio is still out. I realize this question is now in the wrong thread, but it might be better than starting a new thread.

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Did you check in Device Manager to see if it shows up or if it has an "X" or a yellow caution symbol next to it?

OCNoob, if you would spend as much time trying to help people actually solve the problems they have using the components they already have (and have already spent money on) I think we would all appreciate it. Your answer to almost every AMD user issue is the same: Drop it and go Intel. It's like a broken record.

@trants had a yellow caution symbol, so something went wrong with the driver I'm guessing. I tried to just uninstall the device and let it reinstall, no joy, so I uninstalled the drivers and software, reboot, uninstalled the devices, it was showing up in the sound category and under system devices, reboot and installed new software reboot and scanned for hardware changes, all is working again. Stuff goes wrong when you change stuff around, so back to square one on the OC.

edit: no point in making two posts
@ocnoob that's a real option, ima play around with this for a bit, see what I can do, I will most likely build another system within the next year as prices on older stuff drops some more and have a great unfettered gaming (anything really) machine. No hard feeling about being told I screwed up, it is what it is, I didn't do enough research on cpus and was of the old school theory amd/ati and intel/nvidia combination is the only way to go. not like I started with a wealth of knowledge to begin with, im just a dumb hick tryin to tinker for the most part

trents said:

OCNoob, if you would spend as much time trying to help people actually solve the problems they have using the components they already have (and have already spent money on) I think we would all appreciate it. Your answer to almost every AMD user issue is the same: Drop it and go Intel. It's like a broken record.

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Not at all. I suggest people go AMD a lot of the time, via PM sometimes, sometimes in forums. There are cases where AMD is the best bet. Fact is, even Earth Dog started this thread off saying going Intel would be the best bet. You know as well as I do that with 2 290X's an i5 or i7 with PCIE 3.0 is a better bet.

t1nm4n said:

edit: no point in making two posts
@ocnoob that's a real option, ima play around with this for a bit, see what I can do, I will most likely build another system within the next year as prices on older stuff drops some more and have a great unfettered gaming (anything really) machine. No hard feeling about being told I screwed up, it is what it is, I didn't do enough research on cpus and was of the old school theory amd/ati and intel/nvidia combination is the only way to go. not like I started with a wealth of knowledge to begin with, im just a dumb hick tryin to tinker for the most part

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I wasn't saying you screwed up. Nothing nearly that harsh. I was just saying that you'd be best served by an i5 or i7. Given what you've spent on GPUs (at least $600 US given current prices, maybe you payed more when these cards were new) I just think spending that bit extra on an i5 system to open everything up and un-bottleneck yourself is your best bet.

Like I said an 8320/50 is the next best thing but still won't open your system up the way an i5 would.

@ t1nm4n, if you are prepared now or in the future to just put the FX-4350 cpu and CHV-z up for sale or in the closet and move ram and cooler and video cards to an Intel setup; then that is a good thing.

However if you are not quite ready for that, then I still suggest that you try and clock that seemingly very cool 4 core on up toward 5.0Ghz and see what happens. I have not really seen any proof of a bottleneck to date, just a thought that it might do so. Probably will some but by how much and how much is it worth for 15 or 30FPS. Might be pretty pricey FPS with it likely costing $300 to $350Usd to get in with cheaper base mobos like an Asus -A series board. Of course it is certainly your money. Think i have even spoken of going Intel in the thread already, but I never suggest getting out the checkbook until the current situation is totally exhausted. YMMV. Luck man.
RGone...ster.

All great points!

As far as proof, I linked up a review in my post that should satisfy that question.