New gigabyte mb

[Yellowbeard]

I recently had a static discharge on my HP brand ASUS M2N-LA mb. My fault. I upgraded the CPU several months ago from the stock Phenom X3 8400 (2.1 mHz) to the Phenom X3 8750BE (2.4 mHz) All was good, of course, until recently with the static discharge. The HP mb bios has no settings or options to speak of.

I bought from newegg the GIGABYTE GA-MA785GM-US2H AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 785G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard and a new OCZ 550W power supply. The insatallation went excellent and Windows 7 was very good with the change. I had to re-activate. but not did not have to re-install win7.

It has been a long time since I have seen a bios with so many options. I was thrilled. Once the operating system was happy I clocked the CPU at 15x (3.0 mHz) with one tick up on the cpu voltage. It booted and ran fine. I was impressed. My memory is DDR2 and does not like fsb increase at all.

I ran prime95 and it ran pretty hot. It crashed after a minute or two. I then started slowly. 13x (2.6) stock voltage and prime95 good. I worked my way up to 14x (2.8) with stock voltage (no increase) and it was very stable. Prime95 running Core temp 32c and other temps 61c, 56c, 49c. Not sure what those are connected with. Reported from speedfan. All on the stock HS/fan from HP with Artic silver 5.

I just wanted to share my experience and say it is nice to be back in the OC forum.

Cheers,
YB

 

[trents]

Welcome!

Something that might help you with stability so as to get a little more out of the overclock, possibly and that is to turn on ACC in bios if you have that as an option.

Your temps are fine. I used to own that same CPU. The overclock limit is about 3.0-3.1 but it took me about 1.485 vcore to get there stable. It may be different for you depending on how stable your board's power regulation is. To get a good overclock you may also need better CPU cooling as you would need to jack up the vcore and that makes heat. What kind of HSF are you using? Stock OEM?

 

[Yellowbeard]

Thank you Trents,
At this point I am only wanting to run at the highest stable speed at stock voltage.
14x for a 2.8 speed on this triple core is a 400 mHz increase x3. It is very stable and cool.

I am running the stock HP HS/fan. I put Artic silver 5 on it. Right now, no load it is 22c core heat and 39c other temp sensors. I am not sure what those are in speedfan. It specifically says Core AMD K10 Core 23c. The other temps are values: Temp 1 - Temp 2 - Temp 3 - All three of the other temps have this value when the first one says AMD K10 (IT8718F).

my 2¢
YB

 

[trents]

One of those other temps would be the CPU temp. The CPU temp is different than the core temp, though they are usually close in value. The CPU temp is actually measured from the motherboard socket area below the processor. The core temp is actually taken from the processor die itself. The core temp is the critical one when overclocking since we know that AMD processors start to become unstable when core temps begin to exceed mid 50s c.

However, it is easy to figure out which of those other lines in Speedfan is the CPU temp line. Just run Prime95 withe Speedfan open and watch all the temp line values. The one that increases very quickly (in addition to the one labled "Core") will be the CPU temp. Once you figure which one that is, you can go into Speedfan "Configuration" and the "Temperatures" tab and edit the label to read "CPU Temp" or whatever. By the way, in bios the CPU temp reading is the socket temp, not the core temp and if your motherboard came with hardware monitoring software that will also give you the motherboard CPU socket temp, not the core temp. Only third party utilities like Speedfan, CoreTemp, and HWmonitor will give you actual core temps.

CPU temps can be handy for setting motherboard bios temp alarm thresholds as those things are keyed to CPU temp. CPU temps are usually within a few degrees of core temps but can be different by 10+ degrees on some systems. Also, people who are able to unlock cores on some of the Phenom II CPUs lose the core temp sensing function and so to know the CPU temp can give them a good idea of what core temp is since there is a more our less constant relationship between the two on any given system.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Excellent trents! I figured it out with your help. Running 3.0 gHz with 1.3 volts is stable, however, under prime95 full load the CPU temp reaches 62c after about 5 mins, and the core temp is 42c. Not too bad. The fans kick up quickly.

I turned the AMD K8 Cool&Quiet off. It drops the cpu to 6X and 1.0 volts. Runs cooler, of course, but flips up and down when ever I run a program. Once opened, I can play a recorded show in Media Center and it stays at the lower values. Interesting.

For extra cool running I also experiemented at 10X (2.0gHz) at 1.2 volts and it full loads in prime95 at 50c (cpu) and 38-40c (core), interesting the core temp is about the same with either setting. It actually runs pretty good at this setting. It is not click-snap-pop when running programs, but it click-snaps, and very cool. I am idling 22c core and 38c cpu right now.

This is cooling with the HP OEM HS/FAN with Artic silver 5 I put on it.

The nice thing about a MB with settings is the ability to under clock too.

My 2¢
YB

 

[trents]

I'm suspicious of that 42c core temp at 3.0 ghz with stock cooler, even after only 5 min., esp. when there is an 18c difference between core temp and CPU temp. Speedfan is a nifty little program but you might also try one that is dedicated only to measuring core temp, it's called CoreTemp. HWmonitor is another excellent temp monitoring utility that gives you core temps, CPU temps (although like with Speedfan the CPU temp line might be cryptically labeled) and a lot of other environment measurements. Good to do this for comparison.

By the way, if you run the Prime95 blend test for 10 min. you will achieve core temps that are within about 2c of what they will be for a longer stress test. We call it the "10 min." test and its handy because it allows you to gauge temps while experimenting with the impact on temps of different voltage and speed settings.

You need to run a longer Prime95 test to establish stability, at least 1 hr. You may actually find you need to up the vcore from 1.3 to get it truly stable at 3.0 ghz.