First rig/OC any advice welcome for a slightly unusual situation.

[Sigmas71]

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[EarthDog]

Wait for the AMD people to come in but............

1. That motherboard... yikes. Surprised its even hold an overclock... $50 cheap mobo with 4 power phases and no heatsink... not a good board at all to overclock with... nor is the one you would be getting to replace it.
2. 400W PSU... what brand and model? You would want to upgrade that to something quality and with a bit more horsepower.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Given your info, here's my suggestions.
1)Run at stock only.
2)New cooler. Temps are extremely high. I realize that it's a location issue, but those have to come down. Maybe try to under volt at stock speeds.
The board really isn't meant for a FX processor, let alone overclocking one.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Cooler is more important that the board given your circumstances. I'd work on that first.

 

[Johan45]

The ASUS board you listed isn't much of an improvement over the Gigabyte to be honest. I agree with MrScott. Get the cooling sorted out. Even with a different board you still need a better cooler.
Also those dips to 3.0 are most likely throttling. I doubt your BIOS will have some of the options needed to stop that as well. You can look for APM and also HPC. APM might be there. If so disable it.

 

[trents]

Are temps really that high? i was assuming they were well within actual safe parameters even though worse than actually recommended.<<<<?????
Regardless i made a few changes
- set the multiplier lower to 4ghz
- set manual voltage to 1.35
- changed the llc from auto to normal (the only other option is extreme)
- and tried running prime95 again. Temps stayed around 54 C when running 6 threads of that "torture test" after half an hour.

The readings in hwmonitor were interesting (to me) but i stupidly botched the screenshot??? i swear thats never happened to me before D: Anyways my vcore remained considerably lower, occasionally reaching 1.338v but staying in the 1.32's. i regret not being able to undervolt as you suggested. My bios wont let me go bellow 1.35. Should i try to get my desired freqs by changing fsb multi? what kind of change should i expect in my overal voltage that way? or is it the same thing.. im kind of lost.

Also, during the tests i notice my cores jumping between 4000 and 3000 very quickly. Is this a power saving feature i should turn off? or is it throttling? i'm inclined to power feature since there are fewer jumps when running 6 threads of testing than 3 threads.

Turbo?

tomorrow i will search online and make more calls for a cooler as suggested, but realistically i'm looking at one or even several months with this hardware. The other board is ready for me, on the other hand. Is it worth the switch? The sucker will charge equivalent of 40 bucks to replace my board, taking the old one. I might get him to just sell me it... idk

I will probably do some more testing when the weekend is here. Input on any of my thousand questions is welcome. night folks

 

[ShrimpBrime]

No. Water cooling AIO kit. Something with 120.2 radiator would work nicely. H100, H105, H100i - Or something equivalent.

Why liquid cooling? It transfers heat away from the processor and dissipates outside of the case. Is usually quieter with better temps. Can be used on all AM2 AM2+, AM3 and AM3+ motherboards and if the kit comes with Intel brackets, then you can swap from AMD to Intel. Closed units require little maintenance. You can simply blow the dust out of the rad now and then like you would an air cooling heat sink.

Is AIO liquid cooling worth the extra 50$ for AMD FX processors? You bet your 50 bucks on that

 

[EarthDog]

Agreed... sans Corsair AIO. WHile I am sure it will be fine, I see many complaints here and there. I would go with Nepton, Seidon, BigWater 3.0, Kraken, etc...

Problem is, not matter if his VRMs have heatsinks on them, its still 4 phase so I doubt much if any overclocking will happen there.