[dyckah]

hey, i just built a new rig for my brother to do some light gaming on, and now that its built i was looking into doing some light overclocking on it, see if i could get it a slight performance boost in a few games he is going to play on it(mainly guildwars 2).
the rig is the A8-3870k processor, in a gigabyte A75-UD4H, with a Corsair A70 cooling it.
most of the temp monitoring software doesnt come up with any numbers for temps, but HWMonitor is one of the ones that does, but the idle numbers seem screwed (normally idling at around 0-8C, with cool n quiet turned on), so im wondering if the load temps are also way off, at the stock clock, prime95 gets me load temps of around 28-32C, and the mobo is set at auto voltages for now, and under load, im seeing 1.41 vcore, at idle it jumps down to 1.02 vcore
does that seem right?
and its been a while since i've used an AMD rig, what should i be looking at for a safe temperature range, and safe vcore range?

[dyckah]

so nobody has any thoughts or insight as to why none of the temp programs other than HWMonitor come up with any temps for this APU?

[AdmiralAdama]

I have a A8 3870k. Using HWMonitor at idle it shows 0c which isn't right but it does give the correct temps under load. If you look at where it says CPUTIN it should give you the correct cpu temp idle or load. The core temps shouldn't be too far off of that.
Your stock vcore of 1.41 for 3.0 GHz is too high. You should get 3.5GHz easy with that much vcore. Also increase the iGPU to 800MHz seems to help with gaming.
If your brother wants a better gaming experience xfire the APU with a 6670. This makes a huge difference especially with BF3. I picked a new one up off of ebay fo $65cdn.

[dyckah]

cool, thanks for the response. i was thinking that vcore was a little high. and yeah, the 6670 upgrade was something we were planning on doing at some point down the road, once he gets a little more cash built up. i do plan on playing around with the overclock for him, just wanted to be sure of load temps being accurate.

[trents]

With a really good aftermarket cooler like the A70 my experience is that the core temp will generally be about 10c cooler than the socket temp. If there's more diff than under load that I suspect poor temp sensor calibration. By the way, you don't have the core unlocking feature enabled in bios do you. That can scuttle core temp readings. But I don't know if any of the APU motherboards even have core unlocking.

[dyckah]

havent really played around in the bios at all yet, but no, i havent enabled any core unlocking feature.

[dyckah]

just got back from my brothers place, he doesnt have a CPUTIN value in HWManager, only other temp reading i get are TMPIN0(idle temp 28, load temp 28), TMPIN1(idle temp 58, load temp 90), and TMPIN2(idle temp 0, load temp 30).
the TMPIN2 temp matches up just about perfectly with the core temps, and the TMPIN1 temp scares me, what on an amd chip/board would possibly be running that hot?

[AdmiralAdama]

This is what mine shows idle and under prime95 @3.5GHz

Idle shows 128c but everything is cool to the touch


Under prime95 it instantly drops to 32c


Must just be the temp sensors with AMD. This is my first AMD so have nothing to compare it to as I always had Intel in the past. Since your brother is getting similar results it must be common with these chips.