Help me Overclock my FX-8370

[Kenrou]

One thing I noticed was in his screenie he has his CPU-NB at 2600. While certainly doable with some chips/systems this can and will make a CPU run a little hotter.

Vishera's as a norm really doesn't like it much above 2400 anyway, If you've OC'ed it on the CPU-NB beyond 2400 you can drop it back down to 2400, drop CPU-NB voltage accordingly and check temps that way and see if there is any effect.
What you normally get past 2400 isn't worth the extra heat and stress on the system, esp for everyday use.

Dropped CPU/NB to 2400, dropped CPU/NB voltage from 1.35v to 1.25v but under stress testing it resulted in only a ~2c loss, so i went from ~61c to ~59c @4.7ghz (air cooling with a NH-D15). Should it have dropped more ?

 

[Frohteloss]

My Nb is at 2400 currently. It actually didn't even give me the option to go higher in the BIOS. And I'm down to 1.25 on the CPUNB voltage which helped the temps a little.

The last couple of stress tests I did didn't break 70 for the socket temps (which has been my main headache) and passed stability-wise. Didn't look like any cores were throttled either. So I'm thinking I'm at a fairly stable OC for a 24/7. If I ever decide to do any rendering or anything that requires stress test levels of core usage, I may back it down to 4.5 or even 4.4 temporarily (just in case), but for what I use my pc for most of the time, I think where I'm at is probably ok.

That being said, I'm not in love with being so close to the red line in temps while doing stress tests (66-68 on socket temp)... but like i said I'm nowhere near that while gaming which is pretty much the most intensive thing I do on my pc.

I may try to get the fan that's pointing at the VRMs to be closer (as close to touching it as I can), but there's not really many places to attach the fan to that would place it any closer to the VRMs. But I'll see what I can do there.

Let me know if any of you have any thing else I should try or any other tips/tricks. Thanks for all the help!
~Frohteloss

 

[Mandrake4565]

I literally have a 80mm fan strapped to the Vrm heatsink with a zip tie. That and the fan on the backside of my motherboard on my 990 Fx CHV dropped the socket temp 10-11c.

 

[Frohteloss]

Yeah I have a 120mm fan ziptied about 4-5 inches from it but i've been thinking of getting an 80mm right up on it. That being said, I'm doing a big upgrade soon and the new mobo I'll be using has MUCH better VRMs and heat dissipation than my current mobo so I might hold off on that 80mm, at least for now.

 

[Mandrake4565]

Ok so what is it?

 

[Frohteloss]

My new mobo? Oh I'll be switching up to an i7 9700k with a Gigabyte z390 Aorus Master here in a few months. The reason I wanted to oc my current FX8370 was that it has definitely been the bottleneck of the last few games I've played which is why I've decided to upgrade my hw and I wanted to alleviate the bottleneck as much as I can until then.

 

[EarthDog]

In a few months you should wait and see what Zen 2 has to offer.

 

[Frohteloss]

Oh for sure! I'm totally gonna take a second look before I make my final decision!

 

[Frohteloss]

It's been a few weeks and I'm pretty certain of my OC at this point. Despite my original desire to get to 4.7, I've decided to leave it at 4.6 @1.44v (though it usually bumps up to 1.456 due to llc). It's still double the delta of turbo boost and 100 mhz isn't going to be all that noticeable. My temps are pretty good unless I'm stress testing, which puts my socket temp pretty close to the red line, but I don't use my computer for anything that stresses it out that much. Ever since then I've been pretty consistently leaving either HWMonitor or HWiNFO64 on to monitor temps. I do like how HWiNFO64 has an average column which is nice when I leave the monitoring software on for a few days straight to see what the min/max/average temps are. Even when I'm gaming on cpu-intensive games, the temps are definitely within reason so I think I'm comfortable where it's at.

It only has to last a few more months anyways until I do my big upgrade. Which is now up in the air... I really was set on going Intel for the first time in like over a decade, but then I saw the Zen 2 announcement and started doing research on that. It does depend on how the Zen 2 chips do IPC-wise vs Intels as I'm primarily a gamer, but I'm definitely interested and will be waiting until after July to see what the reviewers say about them before I decide on my next upgrade.

Thanks all for all your help getting me here!
~Frohteloss

 

[Ozz1]

im no fan boy of any , my system is amd, coz thats what i had, i dont game, this is only at 4 gig on air, i can run it at 4.2 4.4 no probs with an asrock 890 fx deluxe 3 borad, anyway amd is releasing the zen 3, simple reason, the zen1 or 2 just cant beat intel, so maybe the new series has some impact, if you look at all the top boys in gaming, overclocking , what are they using ?, ,intel ill bet ya, amd knows this, as well as for overclocking, better everything
speaking about cooling the vrm or whatever to help the system overall, this has been on my daily system for i spose now 3 yrs, socket cooling, cpu is a 980BE , all up in my case i have 11 fans, 2 from the cooler master V8 air cooler , the rest in the case, a simple 60 mm fan hot glued on the socket back plate helps heaps with any cpu, not just amd, not that the new intels arent hot running either as they are proving to be just that

 

[steveokinevo]

just for comparison. i have a similar setup.

 

[Frohteloss]

Yeah your mobo probably has better VRM cooling than mine does. I think that's probably the weak spot for me and why I can't get my socket under control at anything beyond a 4.6 OC. Even that is right at the red line during stress tests, yet my cpu core stays at a pretty reasonable temp due to my AIO cooler. I'd probably back it off to 4.5 like you if I was planning on doing any rendering or long 100% cpu usage tasks. But for gaming/normal usage 4.6 has been good for me the last few weeks. I leave HWiNFO64 running pretty much 24/7 since not only does it track min/max like hwinfo, it also calculates averages so I can see what my average temps are over a long period of time.

But the temps are why my next build that I'm currently saving up for is going to focus heavily on mobos that have really good VRMs. Gigabyte seems to put a pretty heavy focus on good VRMs this generation so if I move to intel, I'm probably going Gigabyte z390 Aorus Master and if I go amd (if the Zen 2's have gaming performance rivaling Intel) I'll probably do the Gigabyte x570 Aorus Master.

I'm definitely hoping the Zen 2's gaming performance are up there with Intel's top cpus (like +/- 5% of i9's) because I'd like to get a mobo that has PCIE 4.0 support like the new x570 boards will have for future proofing a little bit, but we'll see. I'm kinda going all in on this build so I don't have to upgrade for a while. I wish I had done more research before I had gotten the FX 8370 because it does not do a great job in cpu-intensive games.

Thanks for all the help and support,
~Frohteloss

 

[steveokinevo]

I do gaming pretty well on mine. I wouldn't necessarily call it a CPU issue. I'm no genius here of course. 50-60 fps for gta5 for example isn't bad. Not glitchy either.....