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Overclocking a Amd a6 3420m

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duLouser

New Member
Joined
Jan 23, 2017
Well hello,

i'm new here and i'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong, but i just tryied to overclock my old Laptop with a AMD A6 3420m processor. Because i'm sure that most people don't know this processor i'll give a short briefing about some essential elements:

It's a rather old processor (15.06.2011) and it's clocked at 1.5Ghz Base-Clock with a turbo frequency of 2.4ghz. From a technical standpoint, the processor has 8 states (p0 to p7). p0 is the boost clock of 2.4ghz and p1 is the base-clock of 1.5Ghz. The other states are lower than 1.5Ghz with the lowest p7 at 0.8Ghz. When set to Power-Mode(a laptop setting of windows) the processor is using the p1 under load (p0 is used very rarely overall). The max temperature at stock settings is 72°C, which sounds like much but it's really low for this processor. I just cleaned the fan and applied new thermal paste 3 days ago, before that the processor was running at 90 to 95°C maximum without problems. The specification allows a maximum of 100°C for the processor, so 72°C gives a lot of room for overclocking. I first used AMD Overdrive, which automaticly selected 2,3Ghz @1,1875V. After that i found a program called "FusionTweaker" (Link here/) to manual adjust the settings (Please note, that it's not possible to do this in the bios of the laptop). I tested a little bit, but i got a problem:

I managed to set the base-clock (p1) to 2,6Ghz @1,1750V "stable", which means, i ran p95 for some time and played some games with it for 2h. The problem is, when i unplug/plug in the power cable(=when the power delivery is changed), a few seconds later, the laptop freezes(this doesn't happen at stock settings). To restart i have to press the power button for 5 seconds, shutting the whole system down immediately.

I'm very new to overclocking and i'm very exited about the immense performance gains my old processor is having (it's a 73% overclock after all ^^), but i don't know how to fix this error. If anybody has any idea what i could do to fix this error i'd be very grateful.

Please note, that i'm not a native speaker and i'm very sorry for my bad english.

Kind regards
 
Leave it plugged in while overclocking. That battery may not have the output to maintain the OC. Likely a low volt hang up.

Run it stock away from the wall.
 
Just off the top of my head - when plugged in, you have it in full power mode in windows which locks the CPU speed to 100%. When you unplug, windows is switching to normal mode and is turning amd cool 'n quiet/speedstep on. With your new P state, cool 'n quiet isn't sure what to do and thus you get a lock up.
Make sure high power mode is selected for both plugged in and battery states. Otherwise, yeah you'll just have to play plugged in.
 
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Just off the top of my head - when plugged in, you have it in full power mode in windows which locks the CPU speed to 100%. When you unplug, windows is switching to normal mode and is turning amd cool 'n quiet/speedstep on. With your new P state, cool 'n quiet isn't sure what to do and thus you get a lock up.
Make sure power mode is selected for both plugged in and battery states. Otherwise, yeah you'll just have to play plugged in.

This would be my suggestion as well. And if you have any power conserving settings in bios, disable them.
 
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