Request for Help 4.6 on FX8350

Happy New Year All,

Would be grateful for some expert advice.

I just upgraded from my 1055t for Christmas (which thanks to help from these forums I had going at 3.5 24/7 - so first of all thanks for that )

I am using the same board (Asus M5A99X Evo r.1. with latest bios) on an new FX8350 and seem to be stable at 4.6ghz (although to be fair, I have only dared try it for a short time so far as I don't really know what I am doing )

Can anybody please tell me whether the temps on attached screenie and my settings look OK? The temps and readings are after only 10 mins on Prime95 small fft. I have run it for half an hour before though and it seemed to stay level with all fans belting out at full tilt. Beyond that I get a bit edgy and wonder if I am doing it any damage!

It is air cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 and a Coolermaster case with 2 top exhaust fans, a rear exhaust fan, two front intake fans, a side intake fan, an underside intake fan - so a LOT of fans - sounds a bit like a jet turbine really!

I have just copied bits of other people's ideas. Basically just upping the multiplier and voltage. A lot of the settings are a bit of a trial and error mystery to me! Do these settings look OK or is there a better way please anyone?

CPU Ratio 23.0
FSB is at default 200mhz
1.375 CPU vcore
CPU/NB at 1.25v
CPU/NB Freq: 2200mhz
HT Link: 2600 mhz
CPU Spread Spectrum: Disabled
PCIe Spread Spectrum: Disabled
EPU Power Save: Disabled
CPU LLC: Ultra High
CPU NB LLC: Auto
CPU Current Capacity: 130%
CPU/NB Current Capacity 130% (are these too high!!?)
CPU Power Phase: Standard
CPU Voltage Freq: Auto
VRM Spread Spectrum: Disabled
CPU Power Duty: T.Probe
CPU Manual Voltage: 1.375 (two 'bumps - it was originally 1.358 ish)
CPU/NB Manual Voltage 1.25 (read it somewhere!)
CPU VDDA Voltage: Auto
DRAM Voltage: Auto
NB Voltage: Autop
NB HT Voltage: Auto
SB Voltage: Auto
Cool n Quiet: Disabled
CIE: Disabled
SVM: Disabled
Core 6 State: Disabled
HPC Mode: Enabled
APM Master Mode: Disabled

Thanks for reading. Any help appreciated and Good Luck All in 2014.

Cheers

So far the temps look good. Keep the package below 62 and the cpu below 70 and you'll be good. You should be using P95 blend test though, It'll work the memory and controller as well. Also nest time include a screen of the CPU-z memory and spd tabs. Welcome to the forum twocents.

twocents said:

Happy New Year All,

Would be grateful for some expert advice.

I just upgraded from my 1055t for Christmas (which thanks to help from these forums I had going at 3.5 24/7 - so first of all thanks for that )

I am using the same board (Asus M5A99X Evo r.1. with latest bios) on an new FX8350 and seem to be stable at 4.6ghz (although to be fair, I have only dared try it for a short time so far as I don't really know what I am doing )

Can anybody please tell me whether the temps on attached screenie and my settings look OK? The temps and readings are after only 10 mins on Prime95 small fft. I have run it for half an hour before though and it seemed to stay level with all fans belting out at full tilt. Beyond that I get a bit edgy and wonder if I am doing it any damage!

It is air cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 and a Coolermaster case with 2 top exhaust fans, a rear exhaust fan, two front intake fans, a side intake fan, an underside intake fan - so a LOT of fans - sounds a bit like a jet turbine really!

I have just copied bits of other people's ideas. Basically just upping the multiplier and voltage. A lot of the settings are a bit of a trial and error mystery to me! Do these settings look OK or is there a better way please anyone?

CPU Ratio 23.0
FSB is at default 200mhz
1.375 CPU vcore
CPU/NB at 1.25v
CPU/NB Freq: 2200mhz
HT Link: 2600 mhz
CPU Spread Spectrum: Disabled
PCIe Spread Spectrum: Disabled
EPU Power Save: Disabled
CPU LLC: Ultra High
CPU NB LLC: Set to high
CPU Current Capacity: 130%
CPU/NB Current Capacity 130% (are these too high!!?)
CPU Power Phase: Standard
CPU Voltage Freq: Auto
VRM Spread Spectrum: Disabled
CPU Power Duty: T.Probe
CPU Manual Voltage: Change to 1.45 Volts
CPU/NB Manual Voltage 1.2 to 1.25 is fairly standard. I would leave it where you have it.
CPU VDDA Voltage: Change to 2.5 Volts
DRAM Voltage: See what your ram voltage is. It probably going to be 1.5 volts.
NB Voltage: Autop
NB HT Voltage: Auto
SB Voltage: Auto
Cool n Quiet: Disabled
CIE: Disabled
SVM: Disabled
Core 6 State: Disabled
HPC Mode: Enabled
APM Master Mode: Disabled

Thanks for reading. Any help appreciated and Good Luck All in 2014.

Cheers

Click to expand...

Once you confirm those settings are stable in Prime95. I would try to back the voltage down by 1 step. Recheck stability with Prime95 and continue until it is unstable then go back up one notch on voltage.

twocents if that working Vcore of 1.37 and max Vcore of 1.38 is seen while running P95 then there is NO way in H*LL I would be dorking around trying to lower the Vcore by some mythical notch. You are already showing a lesser Vcore being used for 4.6Ghz than 75% of the users coming in here and posting their in use Screen Shots.

4.6Ghz on air with your shown temps and your Vcore is actually 'excellent'. I have to use a good bit more Vcore to get stable at 4.7Ghz with my early FX-8350 from right when they went into retail sales.

If the settings you have for 4.6Ghz will withstand a 2 hour P95 Blend run without issue and Cpu/Socket temps not greater than 70c and Core/Package temps not greater than 62c then you are freeken golden at 4.6Ghz.

Pass the 2 hours of P95 Blend and the only thing left really is maybe 4.7Ghz OR ensuring you have ram running at least to its' rated speed or a little more maybe and that CPU-NB is in the 2500Mhz range or maybe a little more to assist ram performance. I wish my own rig ran as well as yours seems now. Not that mine is not fine...but yours does it with less Vcore and Temps than mine. Hehehe., Good job man.
RGone...ster.

Thanks for the encouragement guys. Falling down on the blend test. Will go all day long on Small fft but as soon as I introduce the memory into the test it runs a lot cooler but after 15-20 minutes in I get:

"Test Stopped. Errors 0, Warnings 100"

on one of the cores.

Upped vcore twice - now at 1.3875 - but no effect. Do I just need to keep upping it or is this something to do with the memory or how it talks to the cpu? The Memory is 8gb (2*4gb sticks) of Corsair Vengeance 1600LP which I am running at 1333 (also tried auto, tried 1600). Ram voltage is per SPD at 1.5 volts. Also upped CBU/NB LLC to High and CPU VDDA Voltage to 2.5 per Prilla's annotations (thanks for the help).

Screenie is after an hour of just small fft and with the upped cpu volts - levels out at 54 degrees core now.

In the bios, my DRAM Timings are on auto, The spec says 9,9,9,24,34 for 666mhz and 9,9,9,24,41 and 2T for 800mhz on the CPUID tab. I started trying to set these manually in the bios but there are way more than just these settings and they don't all correspond so I am out of my depth!

EDIT: Just found a bunch of ram settings in the bios which are currently as follows:
Bank Interleaving: Auto
Channel Interleaving: Auto
ECC Mode: Enabled
Power Down: Disabled
Memory Hole Remap: Enabled
DCT Unganged Mode: Enabled

Do they look OK?

Thanks for all the help so far.

All the best.

I doubt you have ECC ram installe so Disable >> ECC Mode: Enabled

Did a pretty thorough look see at the settings you say you are using overall.
1. I would out of curiosity drop HT Link speed from ~2600mhz to say 2400Mhz. ON the odd chance that board will not
do 2600Mhz for HT link speed. Some oddly did not like 2600Mhz though it IS AMD's Spec for HT Link Speed.

2. Ram timings look okay. Raise ram voltage to 1.55V up from 1.50V spec. It will not hurt BUT might help and most of us do so. I do.

3. So here I am looking at all your settings and short of the Vcore you had that was super low initially but now in P95 Blend you are having issue passing P95 blend.

We see many many peeps come in asking about their settings and they have some pretty good speeds. WE suggest to test with P95 Blend and oh my gawd the situation went into the toilet. I think you are there with that mobo and the CPU speed you are trying to run.

At this point we always have to say, back it down some and REtest to see if P95Bl passes. Normal cpu speed for that FX-8350 so drop back to 4.0Ghz at say 1.37Vcore and run P95B for at least 20 mins and see if P95 has any issues. If not bump up to 4.1Ghz and test and so until P95B fails then up the Vcore and test again. CPU/Socket temp not higher than 70c and Cpu Core/Package temps not to exceed about 62c >> during any of the testing.

That image in your post #5 is great and better than most get their heads around. Need to see such at 4.0 and upward with HWMonitor running in background to get min/max temps and volts for each speed you pass or maybe just the last speed you pass. Then we know the next increment of speed fails. We can see what gives.

My guess is that board has done okay for a few in here up to 4.5Ghz and gets wonky after that. Your 4.6Ghz is after that and you may have to back off on the cpu speed a bit OR be looking at more cooling for higher Vcore. Your testing should give us a look-see from a distance.
RGone...ster.

RGone said:

I doubt you have ECC ram installe so Disable >> ECC Mode: Enabled

Did a pretty thorough look see at the settings you say you are using overall.
1. I would out of curiosity drop HT Link speed from ~2600mhz to say 2400Mhz. ON the odd chance that board will not
do 2600Mhz for HT link speed. Some oddly did not like 2600Mhz though it IS AMD's Spec for HT Link Speed.

2. Ram timings look okay. Raise ram voltage to 1.55 up from 1.50V spec. It will not hurt BUT might help and most of us do so. I do.

3. So here I am looking at all your settings and short of the Vcore you had that was super low initially but now in P95 Blend you are having issue passing P95 blend.

We see many many peeps come in asking about their settings and they have some pretty good speeds. WE suggest to test with P95 Blend and oh my gawd the situation went into the toilet. I think you are there with that mobo and the CPU speed you are trying to run.

At this point we always have to say, back it down some and REtest to see if P95Bl passes. Normal cpu speed for that FX-8350 so drop back to 4.0Ghz at say 1.37Vcore and run P95B for at least 20 mins and see if P95 has any issues. If not bump up to 4.1Ghz and test and so until P95B fails then up the Vcore and test again. CPU/Socket temp not higher than 70c and Cpu Core/Package temps not to exceed about 62c >> during any of the testing.

That image in your post #5 is great and better than most get their heads around. Need to see such at 4.0 and upward with HWMonitor running in background to get min/max temps and volts for each speed you pass or maybe just the last speed you pass. Then we know the next increment of speed fails. We can see what gives.

My guess is that board has done okay for a few in here up to 4.5Ghz and gets wonky after that. Your 4.6Ghz is after that and you may have to back off on the cpu speed a bit OR be looking at more cooling for higher Vcore. Your testing should give us a look-see from a distance.
RGone...ster.

Click to expand...

RGone, You sir are a genius

Dropped back to 4.5ghz, dropped HT to 2400, upped DRAM voltage to 1.55v and disabled ECC and now fully stable P95 Blend for 2 hours. No errors or warnings. Vcore still at 1.3875.

Saving as an O/C profile and will keep tinkering to see how/if I can push it any further.

Well happy. Thanks to Priller and John45 as well for all the help.


No screenie this time - was a dummy and lost the ctrl+printscreen

Cheers.

For future reference, twocents, please don't cram so many images into one screen shot of the whole desktop as you did in post #5. When you do that, each program window gets shrunk down so much it is very difficult to read the frequency and voltage values. If you need to, capture each as a separate image attachment and crop first. Snipping Tool in Windows Accessories is great for this.

@ twocents if you are posting more at all. Far easier also for those who come and read the forum for "help" that they can see what is in the 'box'. Hehehe. Good deal on your clock man.
RGone...

Put up Sig at OCF.

New Shortcut method for putting a Signature with your system information following your every post so people can know what is in the case that they are trying to assist with. You can use something like what is shown in my signature as a good template of needed information Thank you.

Thanks. btw, I got the HT back up to 2600 and the memory running full at 1600 on 4.5ghz fully stable no problem. As soon as I push to 4.6 (next 0.5 on multiplier) I can only get about 1 hour into the blend test. So frustrating - gets past the 800,000 iterations stage and then fails on a small one not even at max vcore! Set the CPU power phasing to 'optimized', dropped the memfreq to 1333 and am now at 1.4 vcore on my 4.6 test profile. Should I be disabling things like firewall and antivirus and pagefile and putting manual settings into the blend test or just the defaults? Also, before I had one of these unlocked chips, I just used to bump the fsb. Do you think a combination of multiplier and fsb might help the blend? Good news is guess what idiot forgot to check that the case fans were set to min all through the last testing - turned them up and stripped a load of guff out of the case. Thats dropped the temps a few degrees

twocents said:

. . . Also, before I had one of these unlocked chips, I just used to bump the fsb. Do you think a combination of multiplier and fsb might help the blend? . . .

Click to expand...

Yes, we find that to be true. Combo works best. But it makes for more complex overclocking as you have to adjust not only the FSB but the memory frequency, the HT Link and the CPU/NB frequencies. They are all tuned to the FSB.

This is as honest a statement as I know how to make having looked at 99.99% of every thread posted in this forum section. This is your problem with 4.6Ghz >> Motherboard: Asus M5A99X Evo r.1.1 << They just do not have the cpu power circuit, ballsy enough to tote the mail at much beyond 4.5Ghz or so has been the siituation as I have most often seen it.

You are overclocking well with only multiplier; in another thread a user could NOT overclock at all with only the multiplier. So try the mixture of FSB and Multiplier. You don't have to ask us if TRYING things is okay. Most overclocking is ALL trial and error anyway.

I don't turn off anything when running P95 Blend since that stuff will be on daily...want my stressing to be done under normal conditions.

I will say this. At some point over the last 20 months it has been thought that using FSB and Multiplier could reach X cpu speed with slightly less voltage to the cpu, than using the multiplier only. Sometimes that idea works and sometimes not. Again I repeat...overclocking is ALL trial and error. My system is n0t like yours, so the results will be different.
RGone...ster.

twocents said:

Thanks. btw, I got the HT back up to 2600 and the memory running full at 1600 on 4.5ghz fully stable no problem. As soon as I push to 4.6 (next 0.5 on multiplier) I can only get about 1 hour into the blend test. So frustrating - gets past the 800,000 iterations stage and then fails on a small one not even at max vcore! Set the CPU power phasing to 'optimized', dropped the memfreq to 1333 and am now at 1.4 vcore on my 4.6 test profile. Should I be disabling things like firewall and antivirus and pagefile and putting manual settings into the blend test or just the defaults? Also, before I had one of these unlocked chips, I just used to bump the fsb. Do you think a combination of multiplier and fsb might help the blend? Good news is guess what idiot forgot to check that the case fans were set to min all through the last testing - turned them up and stripped a load of guff out of the case. Thats dropped the temps a few degrees

Click to expand...

A higher HT Link speed does not mean better performance.

Look at the HT Link & NB Frequency.




Always match those two speeds. If you can play around with them to see what the fastest multi is then match them. For me x12 on both runs without issue.

Priller, thanks for the tip. Matched HT and NB per your suggestion. Genius!

Now stable for full 2 hours Prime 95 Blend test!!! Over the moon! Had the windows open to help keep the temps down (it is cold today) and still topped out at 54 degrees core! Here are the settings I used: Hope they may be of help to someone.

vcore: 1.4125 (CPUID fluctuated between 1.404 and 1.416)
CPU Power Phase: Optimized
NB and HT equated per Priller's advice (at 2147mhz - didn't dare go higher on first run!)
Multiplier: 21.5
FSB: 214
Ram running at 1333, which after fsb overclock equates to 1430 (they are 1600 sticks)
Changed CPU VDDA Voltage to 'Auto'

Happy Days!

Now just need to see how she behaves with the windows shut and Battlefield 4 pushing my GTX 670 to 80 degrees in the case...

ps also stable at 1.368 vcore for 4.5ghz - h*ll of a jump for an extra 100mhz!

Thanks again everybody and good luck.

Looking good. I have a very similar setup, an OC'd using strictly multipliers (see sig).

Well done

Thanks bamato, and you are doing that off 1.35v - way to go!!!

I just had a quick blast on BF4 as a test and temps were all good (even with the windows closed!). However, when I closed the game, ASUS Suite was saying that the 5v rail was at something ridiculous like 1.4v - you know, the little blue pop-up notifications it sometimes gives in the bottom right hand corner?

Surely this must be a glitch as it would have shut down the machine? Everything is working fine and I haven't even rebooted. HWMonitor showed normal ranges. So did Asus Suite when I actually opened it, although slight differences to HWMonitor. Nothing major.

Asus Suite did this to me before a few days ago with a different popup saying that the mobo temp was like 120 degrees or something Again, after playing BF4. HWMonitor said otherwise and everything was fine. Am I trying to pull too much from PSU? Any ideas?

C_D, "johan", "mandrake" and myself all un-intalled that POS Ai Suite for just that reason Reporting volts way the heck off. I think it once hollered at me that my +5V was over 6V and that ain't never happened with the P/S I am using. So Ai Suite does not grace my hard drive.
RGone...

C_D, "johan", "mandrake" and myself all un-intalled that POS Ai Suite for just that reason Reporting volts way the heck off. I think it once hollered at me that my +5V was over 6V and that ain't never happened with the P/S I am using. So Ai Suite does not grace my hard drive.
RGone...

Click to expand...

Ditto, Ai Suite is nice when you're overclocking on the fly, but the issues we've seen with it installed outweigh keeping it.

twocents said:

Priller, thanks for the tip. Matched HT and NB per your suggestion. Genius!

Now stable for full 2 hours Prime 95 Blend test!!! Over the moon! Had the windows open to help keep the temps down (it is cold today) and still topped out at 54 degrees core! Here are the settings I used: Hope they may be of help to someone.

vcore: 1.4125 (CPUID fluctuated between 1.404 and 1.416)
CPU Power Phase: Optimized
NB and HT equated per Priller's advice (at 2147mhz - didn't dare go higher on first run!)
Multiplier: 21.5
FSB: 214
Ram running at 1333, which after fsb overclock equates to 1430 (they are 1600 sticks)
Changed CPU VDDA Voltage to 'Auto'

Happy Days!

Now just need to see how she behaves with the windows shut and Battlefield 4 pushing my GTX 670 to 80 degrees in the case...

ps also stable at 1.368 vcore for 4.5ghz - h*ll of a jump for an extra 100mhz!

Thanks again everybody and good luck.

Click to expand...

Run Cinebench R15 with your existing settings if you can.

Then Change VDDA(Same as PLL on other boards) back to 2.5 Volts. This is standard.

Then Change your multiplier for the HT Link and NB Freq from 10 to 11 on both matching speeds again.

Then run Cinebench R15 once again.

Thanks Priller. Here are results compared. Any good?