Total beginner looking for help taking first OC steps for AMD FX4300

[Orangehat44]

Hello all i'll preface by saying I'm new to this, have tried to do a bunch of research but seem to only get more confused by conflicting opinions coupled with reading some articles and guides that might be 4+ years old vs newer ones. Do to this i've been some what timid to start.

PC is:
AMD FX-4300
ASUS sabertooth 990FX R2.0
16 gb gskill ram ddr 1866
Raidmax RX-700AC 700w 80 plus bronze
radeon hd 6870 1gb

Let me know if i need to list any other specs.
Bought this pc off a friend for cheap as he had a failed hdd and didnt feel like fixing, i only had to add windows 10 and replaced harddrive (with ssd), but knew at the time the gpu was one of the weaker links i would want to upgrade sooner than later. but i can play most of my main games on respectable settings (xcom2, totalwar warhammer, Eve online usually 2-3 clients at once which seems to be my worst case load after doing some monitoring last night.)

My interest in trying to overclock got peaked when i was researching and asking for advice on upgrading my gpu. unfortuantly we had some unexpected car issues come up that cut into my upgrade budget, and probably wont be able to upgrade the gpu for a month or so. but in my questioning many mentioned the fx4300 was the bottleneck and with my mobo could look into overclocking it a bit. i have AC so room temp doesnt swing much, but i do want to open her up and clean her and get a good baseline for current cooling. (I believe friend gave me a arctic freezer a30 extreme cpu cooler amd 320w with the pc when i bought it but he hadnt installed it, i gotta see if i can find it, if i can i could add that if that would help)

After doing some research yesterday i decided to try to take some baby steps which made me hopeful but also, reasserted the need to evaluate the cooling. (one issue was wife had bunch of icebreaker mint containers that she claims she wants to save to use for god only knows what... piled up infront of one of the case fans, so that certainly wasnt helping things). but i downloaded CPU-Z, HWmonitor, Core-temp, AMD overdrive and prime95.

First off, AMD Overdrive or no? I was finding jsut as many people saying dont touch it with a 10ft pole as people saying they accomplished OC's just fine with it.

When i loaded Overdrive i was seeing target clocks:3800mhz and actual ~4100mhz then saw a post stating the cpus usually 3-400 mhz higher than advertised at stock(multiplier was at 19x). going to 19.5 got me to around 4225 mhz (i could check later when home) and going to 20 was closer to 4400, fiddled with voltage up alittle not noticed much and either set it one tick above stock or back to where i found it.

played for the night while monitoring temps and nothing seemed too bad, even noticed a bit of improvemnt on xcom2 with gpu hitting max load less (still conastantly high but not chopping out as much as previous) then i turned on prime 95 let it run for a bit but prob 10-15 min in it was showing a -3-5 deg temp margin on amd overdrive (so 3-5 C over limit i believe is what that means) and turned it off and went to bed (didnt have the gut to let prime stay running didnt know what could happen if temps rose too much). also not sure if i set it up right (i think i did blend test but there seemed to be newer options than any guide i had read on it)

I be happy to post pictures of monitors and cpuz later just tell me what to show. i'd also like some help looking into memory settings, i recall my friend saying he needed to f round with the memory settings to get the ram to read at the right speed, i think he said it was registering as 1600 instead of 1866 or something like that. I'd be interested to see what i could get out of it with the cooling i got (once cleaned up alittle) and or if i should mount that arctic freezer thinggy if i can find it.

Thanks in advance

 

[Robert17]

Welcome to OCF!

Here is a link for your MB's manual and otherwise ASUS site where you can download drivers, BIOS updates, etc. You'll need it if you want to learn where & how in BIOS you can change settings for various overclocking desires.

Otherwise, check out the other OCF categories such as AMD CPUs where you'll find a number of sticky threads to get you started.

You'll be borgged in no time.

 

[caddi daddi]

some more good reading>>>> http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...ormance-Scaling-Charts-max-OCs)LN2-Results-co


we need to you know some basics so you can make the requested changes and to be able to recover your system incase what we ask you to do fails, we need you to be able to reset your bios to default, reset your cmos and be able to update, backdate and recover from a corrupt bios and also, be able to read when we have mistyped something.

 

[Orangehat44]

some more good reading>>>> http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...ormance-Scaling-Charts-max-OCs)LN2-Results-co


we need to you know some basics so you can make the requested changes and to be able to recover your system incase what we ask you to do fails, we need you to be able to reset your bios to default, reset your cmos and be able to update, backdate and recover from a corrupt bios and also, be able to read when we have mistyped something.

What else would you need? I believe i know how to reset bios to default and reset cmos, not sure how to backdate and recover from corrupt bios(looking into that in the manual, need to dig see if i got the support dvd, i think cause my friend seemed to have all the boxs and cd's to give me). i was about to dive into the bios and see what version i had, i grabbed the latest version. i've heard and read with the asus ez flash2 its doable by putting the file on a usb stick. do you simply put it on there? does the stick have to be empty of everything else, i saw a snippet about having to partition it in the manual, but seems you follow instructions from support software so back to finding that cd. Not sure what you ment by the last bit " and also, be able to read when we have mistyped something"


Edit: just checked and appears bios version is latest, number matches what i downloaded

 

[caddi daddi]

the bios just goes on the stick with nothing else, please.
on your board there is a way to reflash the bios with the bios on the stick and pressing a button on the back io panel, page 2-12 of my manual. have the paper manual with the rig at all times, one downloaded to the computer is worthless when trying to recover your crashed rig.
a full system backup, with full system image is also needed, on a spare drive not connected to the computer.

 

[caddi daddi]

we need you to go here>>>> http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

download cpu-z and hardware monitor, the free versions of both, open them and look them over.
cpu-z, you can open all the copys you want at the same time and look at all the tabs at the same time, get used to it, we will want to see two or three tabs at the same time, often.

 

[Orangehat44]

I have already downloaded CPU-Z, HWmonitor, coretemp, and AMD overdrive, (i mentioned this in OP but its a bit of a text wall isnt it lol) i played around with AMD overdrive turning up multiplier and cpu vid a few notch or 2 and did notice some performance benefit, but then saw other people saying AMD overdrive wasnt good to use or something...


Anyway i should have those things and know how to snip and upload the pics. and heres one to start with cause my memory tab seems glaringly wrong and when i was poking in bios also noticed the memory setting was weird:




If i understand this at all DRAM freq needs to be mutiplied by 2 since its dual channel, but that still is only like 1444MHz when these are suppose to be 1866 sticks. Correct size is showing up as 16 gb. I've added SPD tab pic as well but i understand even less of what this tab means than the memory tab lol.

 

[caddi daddi]

step one is to set the ram, in bios manually, to match the 933 xmp profile and add .05 to the ram voltage, eg, yours is 1.5 v, make it 1.55.

step two is to delete amd overdrive from your system.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

but then saw other people saying AMD overdrive wasnt good to use or something...

But they didn't say why..... Occasionally like with any software and driver there may be complications.

People that bench mark hard use all types of software. In the past in many cases it was the only way to actually overclock. ClockGen and such while implementing the correct PLL would give the board OC abilities.

For quite some time AMD OverDrive had a good handful of settings bios did not have. Especially on the lower end boards.

I can tell you from experience that I would have never joined the 7ghz+ club without software and software testing.

Just keep noted that for a daily clock, might as well set up bios. But also you can have "FUN" with software overclocking and tinker with settings that may not be available in bios.

Your memory has 2 XMP profiles. There is a command rate of 1T or 2T. It will probably be more stable with the 2T selection. Shouldn't need an overvolt as long as your at 933mhz or less.

 

[Orangehat44]

So, i went into bios to change and found this:




I bumped it up one level not quite understanding why the options were weird numbers like that. and when back on cpuz saw a higher dram freq but 933




I left voltage alone, and nothing on the SPD tab changed. I couldnt find anything about command rate / 1t or 2t.


Funny story i dug in to the box of crap buddy left when i bought the comp and we both had forgotten that when he had the issue with the hdd it got diagnosed as the south bridge. so they sent him a replacemnt mobo but didnt request the original back. turns out the original was fine when we replaced drives and i have another sabertooth 990 fx new in box which also ment i now have a fresh manual copy. and the support cd if anything useful is on there.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

You have the bus frequency increased. Put it back to 200 to find the correct divider for 933.

If you increase the bus frequency you want to lower the divider ie 800mhz and oc 200 bus. This will also increase nb and ht speeds as well as cpu speeds. So you lower these as well and increase bus to get nb and ht frequency back up while increasing cpu speed.

I personally like 225 or 250 bus clocks which brings the 933 divider to 2000. Most decent memory will do this with little more than a volt bump to 1.65v.

The memory settings are in a different menu. If need fast help look into your hand book for a quick reference on memory set up and proper slots and so on.

 

[caddi daddi]

the six settings you see in cpu-z, under the spd tab are the only ones to touch.

on amd overdrive.
shrips, you are very right, but we need for him to learn the bios and get comfy with it so when salvage time arrives he knows his way around in there.

I use software overclocking also, it has it's place, extreme clocking is one and having easy to load profiles when you have a multi use rig and you can load a profile without having to boot to bios, it's there at the click of a couple of keys.

 

[Orangehat44]

So bus frequency was at 216, changed it back to 200, then tried to select 1866 memory frequency and it crapped out on next boot american megatrends screen with 'overclocking failed!' and took be back into bios, set the mem frequency down to 1600 and it starts up now cpu z reads 800 for dram frequency and alot changed on that tab, again nothing changed on spd tab.



dont worry got the MOBO userguid right next to the keyboard now lol. and getting alittle more comfortable diggin in bios despite not understanding 99% yet.


in addition cpu clocks are down but i assume thats expected from turning that frequency down. now closer to 3.9ghz, when it was up round 4.2 with bus freq at 216. but i noticed in overdrive all of a sudden that amd turbo core control is now on, when it wasnt on before.

 

[Orangehat44]

Additional observation / question / what one is right??

I left amd overdrive logger on and hwmonitor on while i went back to work after lunch break(about 4.25 hours) leaving a client of eve running for a minor load (i regularly run 3 at a time which seemed like my typical worst case usage) and i got some strange results. now i know amd overdrive reports thermal margin not actual temperature but in the logging the thermal margin minimums were 16 to a max of 43 c (and being positive margins the larger number means the core is cooler as i understand.) a swing of 27 degrees, but an average of 38. while hwmontiro reports a min cpu temp of 44c and max of 51 a much smaller swing, under the mother board temp reporting, but under the AMD fx-4300 temp tab for 'package' it reported min of 0c and max of 193c?!//?!?




but then i've also heard that amd's reporte weird temps under 45deg C, which if amd overdrive is right i believe the avg 38 c temp margin (whether its using 70c or 60c as the margin) would mean it was under 45c so would that be why hwmonitor is giving wonky numbers?

 

[caddi daddi]

yea, hardware monitor can show some weird temps, I have not seen them that funky on the package before.

you might try adding to the cpu/nb voltage, not to exceed 1.35 at this point.

you should have AI overclock tuner set to manual and turbo core disabled.

 

[Orangehat44]

yea it was set at manual and turbo core off then seemingly when i switched the cpu freq from 216 to 200 turbo core came on. Add to both cpu and NB voltages?

Edit: after looking in bios i assume you meant the CPU/NB Manual voltage, but i want to be clear cause right above it was cpu manual voltage abd below there is nb voltage and nb ht voltage.

cpu/nb manual voltage is defualt at 1.1625

 

[caddi daddi]

set CPU/NB voltage to 1.25.
we will never mess with NB.

 

[caddi daddi]

you will set the cpu & nb voltage to offset mode.
and cpu/nb offset mode to the + sign.

 

[Orangehat44]

so like this?



offset mode and + sign, then change the field i have circled 'cpu/nb offset voltage' to 1.25?

 

[caddi daddi]

yes,highlight that field and tap the + key to add a little with each tap, reboot till you get somewhere close to 1.25.
please excuse me being a little slow, I am a moron and do not have my manual and am booting into bios on a saberpuss to remember the settings.