How can I tell if my PhenomII 955 BE is defective?

[QuietIce]

thanks for clarifying it. ya its running at x16 now. I used to be a big fan of over clocking. read up on it...but got discouraged when i tried to understand ram,latency,timings, ect. ...it all started getting hard to assimilate, and I kinda just gave up on the hobby.
a good way I remember someone putting it was "Anyone can overclock it an extra couple Gigs, but can they get it to run stable? Thats the real trick" it was the stability part that started feeling overwhelming, and as such...the hobby died

Indeed - the BE chips make it very easy to do a simple over-clock and no reason not to over-clock. michta35 gave some good advise and you may as well use it - it's "free" MHz so why not ...?

 

[OC_N00b]

Indeed - the BE chips make it very easy to do a simple over-clock and no reason not to over-clock. michta35 gave some good advise and you may as well use it - it's "free" MHz so why not ...?

ya. good point.
ill probably spend a ocuple hours this weekend and do that.
free speed is alwasy good...as lopngas im not hurting my chip or shortening its life drastically.

 

[QuietIce]

As long as you stick with 1.35 vCore and your core temps don't get above 55°C it won't hurt a thing ...

 

[michta35]

ya. good point.
ill probably spend a ocuple hours this weekend and do that.
free speed is alwasy good...as lopngas im not hurting my chip or shortening its life drastically.

Keep that Vcore 1.55 or less and temps at full load under 55c and you should be good to go.


No one can say for sure what type of degradation these chips will experience since they haven't been out long enough any of us owners to discover these things, but those are the standard temps/volts supplied for us overclockers to keep things under control in an air cooling environment.

If you run water, then those specs may differ some. Heck, I've had my volt at 1.67 accidently when I forgot to set the vcore manually when trying to see the multi wall. I was hitting 60c at idle...LOL..can you say oops.

Anyhow, that was going on a month ago, so don't be afraid to investigate some of your bios settings and potential for really making your 955 hum along. I'd bet you have a 3.8 chip like most of us have, but you never know maybe you have one of the golden 4.0 on air ones You're also on a 32 bit system which lends itself to better stability and higher clocks when your overclocking.