Over Clocking AMD FX6100

[rbruntzjr]

I know just enough about overclocking to be dangerous.

I would like to take my machine a bit higher or tweak it a bit but not sure what steps to take next or not sure what I have done so far is correct. Temps seam to be good. Prime runs with no problem, I have had it run for up to 6 hours and I have it Fold 24/7 when I'm not on it.

I have used AMD Overdrive to help with some of the settings. In using the Hardware monitor I notice it doesn't show all of the Cores, it says Package.

I do have an H100 cooler that I would like to make use of also. Other than normal use and gaming I do Photoshop and Video editing occasionally.

Some advice would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,

Bob

 

[trents]

Your temps are quite low but so is your CPU vcore. To get a higher clock you will need to increase the vcore. It would also be a good idea to disable Cool N Quiet, Turbo core boost, c6, C1E and APM - all the green stuff that downthrottles and can cause instability in overclocking.

 

[Hicksimus]

On top of what trents mentioned you should consider only using the BIOS to do everything. Overdrive adds extra complexity which can cause headaches(among other issues).

 

[rbruntzjr]

Cool N Quite was disabled, I disabled all the others but not sure about APM. Bios of Windows? Gussing Automatic Power Managment? Change the multiplier to 19 and raised the vcore to 1.4. I'll run Prime overnight and see what happens. Running at 4369.8 with a core temp of 47 C with a high of 49 C on TMPIN2. AMD FX-6100 Package temp is 36 C. Is there a reason it doesn't show results for all 6 cores like in others that have posted or is it just this paticular CPU? I would like to see what it would top out at. I'll post pics results and pics tomorrow.

Thanks

 

[RGone]

Is there a reason it doesn't show results for all 6 cores like in others that have posted or is it just this paticular CPU? Thanks

There is only ONE core temp sensor output for most of the later AMD processors. So the programs were duplicating the Core Temp reading as many times as there were cores. Now the program itself has taken such behaviour into account and only shows one Core Temp and now calls it "package" temp, which is more accurate in labeling.

So it is later version of monitoring software and not the processor at all that has changed when no longer showing an irrelevant number of core temps.

 

[trents]

Cool N Quite was disabled, I disabled all the others but not sure about APM. Bios of Windows? Gussing Automatic Power Managment? Change the multiplier to 19 and raised the vcore to 1.4. I'll run Prime overnight and see what happens. Running at 4369.8 with a core temp of 47 C with a high of 49 C on TMPIN2. AMD FX-6100 Package temp is 36 C. Is there a reason it doesn't show results for all 6 cores like in others that have posted or is it just this paticular CPU? I would like to see what it would top out at. I'll post pics results and pics tomorrow.

Thanks

By "bios" we refer to the motherboard bios, not something in Windows. As your computer is booting up your will notice a message on the screen that says something like, "To enter setup press ______" where _________ will be "Delete" or one of the "F" keys. That takes you into "bios" where you can tinker with the settings directly that you are currently trying to manipulate via Windows software. You will find that using the bios directly makes more settings available and it also usually gives a more stable overclock than using software.

 

[rbruntzjr]

Thanks RGone, that explains the temps.

I was refering to just the APM part. There is no reference in my bios to that, unless this version is calling it something else. I uninstalled the AMD Overdrive and all settings have been made using just the bios.

So far at 4.3 all is running stable. Core temp. reached a high of 55C running Prime for 6.5 hours and Folding the last 4 hours.

I would think I would be able to get a little more out of the memory. It is running at stock specs I believe. It's running at stock voltage and only running at 1866MHz in the bios and it is rated at a 2000MHz. Using the mulitplier in the bios for memory, the next step up puts it at 2166MHz.

For genereal computing and gaming I will probablly throtle it back a bit, but will boost it for video editing.
Maybe once I install the H100 cooler I can get a little more.
For being air cooled I am pretty happy with this. The little tweak to the base of the heat sink surface did net me about 7 to 8 degrees of extra cooling than what I started with.

 

[trents]

The issue with memory frequency is not only the capability of the memory itself but the ability of the CPU's IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) to handle the frequency. Your ram may be rated for 2000 mhz but the FX 6100 IMC may not be up to it.

APM=Advanced Power Management. It's one of the key bios components in the FX power regulation scheme. If this is active you may find that the bios throttles down the CPU under heavy load. It's probably there in your bios but as you say it may be called something else.

 

[BlueOceanAlex]

Hey I'm new to overclocking and I'm looking at the temps reported in your threads. I've found that my BIOS tends to report a different CPU temp than what coretemp or HWmonitor tend to report. So I looked around at other forums and some people claim that there's an incorrect reporting and I need to offset +12 to 15 degrees C and not go over around 60c if at all possible. Can anyone here help me verify any truth to that?

Right now I'm stable at 4.1 (multiplier only) and CPU voltage is around 1.275. I show temp average 33c at idle, around 50c at long load. CPU burn rates me at 28gflops average. When screwing with higher voltages (1.33ish) and multipliers I got up to 4.3 33gflops but only for the first measurement.. After the second its at 27gflops and the heat is around 60c and the systems seems... "jerky" which is weird. I've read most of the other posts and forums about OC the FX series and can't seem to find a consensus.

It seems like playing with FSB, NB, or HTT speeds/voltages all have negative impacts on performance and multiplier is the only stable way to do this. (I followed that "FX6100 overclocker's guide" method of matrix testing different approaches)

 

[rbruntzjr]

I have seen the same opinions on temps. With the help of the wonderful people on this forum I have been able to come up with some pretty good settings. You may want to put your system specs in your signature, that will help in knowing what kind of hardware you have in order to make recomendations.

I have been going by the temps displyed by HWMonitor. From what I've learned you don't want to go above 60c. As you can see from my previous results, they were done with air cooling. I now have my H100 installed and now I have way lower temps with higher clock speed than before.

I just turned mine back a bit but here are the settings I have been able to come up with so far for a stable system.

I am able to run stable at 4.6. Increasing the multiplier to 4.8 the system boots but is unstable.

Increasing it further to 5.0 dosen't boot at all.

I'm not sure about how high I can safely take the voltage to see if increasing it will stabilize or if any of the other voltages could be changed. At this piont I'm not quite sure what steps to take next if any.

 

[BlueOceanAlex]

Sorry.. I didn't see anywhere to set my signature.. I have looked through the user settings a little. I'm curious, did you try getting up to 4.5 w/o changing the CPU Freq? Have you run specific benchmarks to compare the true end performance as opposed to stability? Like you this is my first real OC box and I'm kinda learning from everyone else's experiences. Honestly I'm not really impressed with this H212 Evo.. were your experiences any better? It seems like I'm running pretty hot for only 1.3 volts at load.. I even used the high end thermal paste and was extremely careful mounting the cooler.

There's a bios update from Gigabyte btw that fixes the default core voltages. I think it's 1.175 stock on my F9 version. I have 1600 ram underclocked to tighten the timings since some other thread on here suggested that timings would be more beneficial to AMD than freq, and the drop from 800 to 667hz should be negligable. I haven't benchmarked to compare yet, but it passed memtest.

I'm curious about your results especially because we're running nearly identical boxes, except for the case, PSU, and GPU. If you're not running an SSD, it'll change your religion.. make that your next purchase for sure. I have a 2TB storage drive, and a 250GB SSD for my OS and it boots in about 20-25 seconds flat.

AMD FX-6100 @ 4.2, H212 Evo Cooler, Gigabyte 990FX UD3 rev1.1, Quad SLI Nvidia GTX295, Corsair Vengeance 1600 8GB (7-7-7-20 @ 1333), Kingston SSDNow 250Gb, SB X-Fi Titanium, NZXT H2 Case, Corsair TX750 PSU, W7 Ult, LG MDISC BD

 

[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.

 

[rbruntzjr]

I haven't tried without the CPU freq. increase yet since it also increases the mem. and NB. And I haven't run any benchmarks yet. I was trying to find a good stable all around overclock before benchmarking. That's my next step, to benchmark and make a few small tweaks to mem., CPU freq. and multiplier to see what kind of differences the changes might make. Since there are so many benchmarks out there I'm not sure which one would be the best to use.

 

[BlueOceanAlex]

Can't help much there, I've tried a few and they all seem to claim different results but so far I found my best "stable" setup is the one I posted. Any higher and I seem to hit temperature or stability limitations.. I think my next step would be either to move up to the FX-8350 and/or a liquid cooling system, but with a baby on the way it's going to be a while so I'm fairly happy for now. Let me know if you find any good benchmark utils or if you discover anything at all worth mentioning.

 

[rbruntzjr]

I just updated tthe BIOS to F9. Mem. timings do make a difference. After updating everything resets to stock settings. Put everything back in and rebooted. On bootup the bios halted and rest to stock setting, because it said there was a confilct because of overclocking and it was the bios, didn't even get to windows. I had put everything in as it was before. One thing I did forget was to put in the mem. clock timings. They were still set with the default timings. Once I corrected that it booted fine. Gonna experiment for awhile and see what I come up with.

 

[rbruntzjr]

Ok, I used SiSoft Sandra to test changes that were made to the bios. I only benched the proc. and mem. stuff after each change in the bios and this is what I was able to come up with. I was stable at 4.6 until about twenty minutes and had one core drop so I went down to 4.5. All was stable after two hours of Prime. I was able to increase the mem. Freq. to 1840mhz but was able to get better perfomance numbers in the benchmark at 1600mhz. So increasing the clock on the mem. reduced the score. I hate to take the voltages up any more to see if any more of an increase can be made. Not sure how high would still be safe. The H100 seams to keep the temps. pretty low.

 

[RGone]

Good thing you put that very good bios picture there. Using it I think my terminology is sound.

I would bump up the CPU_NB Frequency to about 2456 and to run so you may have to also Increase CPU_NB voltage to about 1.225 or maybe a little higher and then the ram at DDR1840 should equal or beat the performance of the ram at DDR1600. All that is provided the ram at DDR1840 is still using the same timings as shown at DDR1600 in your captures above.

NOTE: I said CPU_NB Frequency to ~2456 since reading it with software in winders it is rounded up due oscillator circuit off to the plus side. In bios it would be a straight raise to 2400Mhz until you begin to play with the CPU Host Clock Control which is what Giga seems to call FSB/CPU Frequency Control.
END NOTE.

 

[trents]

The SiSoft Sandra stress test is pretty wimpy. I wouldn't conclude the overclock was stable just because I passed it.

 

[rbruntzjr]

I only used SiSoft to get benchmark results. Stress was done with Prime.

I'll set the CPU Freq. Control to 2400, and the CPU NB VID Control to 1.225 and see what happens. I'll keep the timings the same. 9, 11, 9, 27. Any changes that I have made to the timing other than this I have gotten errors.

 

[trents]

It's odd that CPU-z "SPD" only gives three memory profiles. It jumps from 533 to 1000 with nothing in between.