Need some help overclocking amd fx 4100

[RGone]

Pics and yoohoo, honey what you do with my cooler box. Hehehe. Heard that man.

We don't have to have pro pics but I am curious why your setup seems to perform so well. I am impressed said another way.

RGone...ster.

 

[Aldakoopa]

Yeah if he just "said" I can do 4.1Ghz with 1.0Volt he never would have been believed by me. Have to be some serious proving of that stuff. There was a time when I was so serious about benching and such not that I would even take a picture apart to see if photochopping had been done. I have not been that serious in a few years now.

Working for the mobo company that I did for 6.5 years, I did a lot of overclocking and benching. Got to the point that I wanted to get there. Get it done now and none of this BS playing aound. Sit down at the rig and in less than 10 hours could know what most of that line of boards and cpus would do except for LN2 which I never fooled with.

I used to push freezing water with a 900 gal per hour pump and even used dryice to cool the water, but no LN2. Had a phase unit I used for a while. So been there and done some of it.

If I was into building one of these rigs I probably would run it like yours at 4.0Ghz and the volts down and the fans on low. Just put a P55 rig together for the wife and facebook and 4 cores and 8 threads at 3.1Ghz is plenty and quiet. Does all my photographic touch-ups and batch renames of 50 photos almost before I can see it done. So it is surely strokes for folks.

I am rambling. Good luck men. RGone...ster.

Yeah, I'm not doing it for the benching or seeing how far I can push it. My computer still has to serve a normal everyday purpose and I just want to push as much as I safely can out of my hardware. I'm running 4.0 because I can do that on stock voltage and as I mentioned earlier, I'm still on the stock cooler.

 

[RGone]

Yeah, I'm not doing it for the benching or seeing how far I can push it. My computer still has to serve a normal everyday purpose and I just want to push as much as I safely can out of my hardware. I'm running 4.0 because I can do that on stock voltage and as I mentioned earlier, I'm still on the stock cooler.

Stock cooler! I hear you man. The problem with hanging around "speed" is we can lose sight of everything else.

 

[Weatherlite]

RGone,

Thanks for posting your three year old wisdom! Seriously! That makes so much sense. I've been doing some tweaking on my son's 4100 and, like you, don't want to max out speed, just get it to a nice stable OC with decent temps so he doesn't have to worry about it being the bottleneck in anything he does. It's been taking quite some time since he lives with his mom...though that does give it a nice stability test when he plays his games for ten hours straight on days I don't get out there. lol With this new info though, I think I'll have him amped up in no time!!

 

[RGone]

Thank you sir...

RGone,

Thanks for posting your three year old wisdom! Seriously! That makes so much sense. I've been doing some tweaking on my son's 4100 and, like you, don't want to max out speed, just get it to a nice stable OC with decent temps so he doesn't have to worry about it being the bottleneck in anything he does. It's been taking quite some time since he lives with his mom...though that does give it a nice stability test when he plays his games for ten hours straight on days I don't get out there. lol With this new info though, I think I'll have him amped up in no time!!

At one time over the course of about 20 months I had to setup and overclock 6 to 10 different setups per week. I was doing what everyone else was doing because IT was how was trained. Somewhere not long into that nearly 2 year stretch it hit me in the forehead.

What is everyone writing into the forums about. How much Vcore can I use and how high will it go. There were plenty who gave the same Max Vcore number for a particular grouping of cpus. Ah Hah, it just got clearer. Maybe a light came on.

I knew we (car thingy) fattened up the fuel when first testing an engine so as not to hurt stuff running lean, so why not do the same when testing for overclock? I said then yes since where I am going is not to be beyond the Max Vcore, why not just establish that and make it my first Vcore setting. No more dissing with Vcore.

I had often checked my registry for errors and I benched every little thing back when with a mobo company. So I could see things got worse after many crashes. I set myself a limit of 3, at the most 4, hard blue screens before I would put back a clean and uncrashed image. Helped my benches.

A few close friends and overclocking nuts saw the wisdom and cut their times to stability by a bunch. I only shared the idea to that particular individual I saw posting in a forum who seemed to know what he was doing by his methodical, logical posting. Usual result was a thank you man, never had it so easy.

Of course that post was visible to all. Did they (all) get it? H*ll no. I think they like to crash and skin knees and crawl to some overclock. Not my problem.

If we can help in anyway, when you are tweaking his rig...put up a post and I will likely see it. Good luck and good fortune to you sir.

RGone...ster.

 

[scottie2d]

I have a FX-4100 and follwong this guide the best stable overclock I can get is 4.2. I have Vcore set to 1.5 and multiplier 21. When I go any higher with the multiplier the machine will boot but prime95 gives me a fatal error. The rounding one. Is there anythig else I can do voltage wise to increase this overclock?

Mobo = Biostar TA990FXE Bios version= 4.6.4
Cpu & Cooler = AMD FX-4100 with Scythe SCKTN-3000 Katana 3 heatsink
Memory = CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
Desktop Memory Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9
Video Card = MSI Radeon 6850
O/S = Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

 

[RGone]

Let us in on the setup. Power supply should be in your signature as well. Thanks man.

Pictures can speak volumes describing what is going on.


Using screen capture software capture the CPU-z image at the CPU button; the Memory button and the
SPD button. The buttons are across the top of the CPU-z window. The Mainboard button can also be used and will show the bios version in case one wanted to check the motherboard bios being up to date.
NOTE: I never capture the whole monitor but only the CPU-z window at each button so that the dang image is not so...so ginormous.


This is link to HWmonitor and as shown on the screen; you would also check the cpu plus (+) so that the core temps of the cpu would be shown. With an AMD cpu we certainly need to see the core temps at least the later AMD cpus.


Download site for Prime95 with some "how to's" included. Prime 95 can be used to stress a system and with HWMonitor opened a temp log will be kept to see if temps get out of hand during or at the time of a failure of P95, if such does occur because of an unstable configuration.


Okay I have not been looking for a screen capture tool but wish many would use some with window capture instead of the whole screen. This proggie comes highly recommended. 4 Capture Modes: Window, Region, Scrolling and Full Screen. I normally use Window or Region so the whole dang screen is not captured and makes the image so dang large. I save capture to .jpg so files are smaller in general.

NOTE: Win7 also has the inbuilt "snipping" tool that can capture just a specific window of the screen so that the entire desktop is not captured.

NOTE 2: Please attach captures to the forum itself so we do not have to travel on a link to some outside site. Thanks man.

Here is what the 3 CPUz tab captures and the capture of HWMonitor could and should look like for neatness and ease of viewing for those that might wish to help with overclocking etc.

 

[scottie2d]

System Setup

My power suppy is a diablotek UL series 775 watt and attached are the screenshots:

 

[RGone]

Your HWMonitor captures does not seem to show Min/Max temps during a 'passed' run of Prime95. So cannot tell how high the CPU cores are actually going.

It begins to sound like your FX-4100 is not as good as some since you are already at 1.5Vcore you say. That is a pretty good amount of Vcore already.

I would drop the multiplier by one number and raise the HT Frequency from 200 to 205 and then see what happens. I would also raise CPUNB to 1.25V. Leave all other voltages as they are and then retest P95 and make sure that HWMonitor is open on the desktop logging MIn/Max while testing P95. Then show all the captures of that result. Memory frequency is going to rise with the move from 200 to 205 HT Freq, so we do need all the captures. And also capture P95 Expanded to be able to see all workers.

Good luck man.

 

[scottie2d]

Test Setup

First of all thank your for your help. Is it possible that my FX-4100 could just be a bad egg when it comes to overclock? I was thinking that maybe the motherboard is to blame.

 

[scottie2d]

I also wanted to point out that I have not installed the Windows 7 hotfixes for the FX series chips.

 

[RGone]

Win 7 hotfixes have nothing to do with stability as far as I have heard anything about. Most apply that to a working setup to try and get a better score in 'benches.

Okay 200 to 205 only raised ram speed a total of 39 DDR. I would bump up from 205 to 210 and I would raise the ram voltage to 1.55V from 1.5 just to add additional stability to ram. It is being advised to do that EVEN if only using multiplier to clock.

You need to SEE if P95 will run longer than just 2 mins since that short time says nothing about stability at all.

205 to 210 and P95 able to run for a minimum of 20mins should give you about 4410Mhz and if I am correct that then puts you in the normal of 4.4 to 4.5Ghz that most are getting. So I cannot say much to the 'worth' of that motherboard. I can only say I personally would not have a Biostar board unless they were furnishing it for me to test and report. YMMV and that is certainly just me.

Make the memory voltage change and bump from 205 to 210 and run P95 and let us see what happens. Luck man.

 

[scottie2d]

Setup

I have increased the memory voltage .05 in the bios but the change isn't noted in CPU-Z. However in HW monitor VIN1 is 1.62V. In the bios it says the is the DDR voltage. Not sure why CPU-Z isn't reporting.

 

[scottie2d]

Motherboard

What motherboard brand do you recomend?

 

[RGone]

IF "I" were buying an AM3+ motherboard, it would be this one hands down. Not a cheap board but something normally is missing when a board costs a lot less than another. Maybe the cosmetics are different when a board costs less in the same "brand". That would not be too bad if one knew it for certain. But by and large you will only get what you pay for and then you must hope the company is in the business of giving what is paid for. This board is very popular among those doing overclocking and in some forums there are entire threads devoted to this motherboard alone. That should make it easy to know what is what, both good and bad pretty easily.


ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
TUF series with 5 year warranty

NOTE: When browsing thru NewEgg thru various brands and models in various price ranges I did notice one thing. Most that reported having an FX-4100 cpu were reported they had overclocked it to 4.2Ghz. That must be the "easy" sweet-spot for those processores.

NOTE2: Have you run prime95 for over 20 mins at 4410Mhz? If it is passing at that rate, then I doubt the motherboard is a real problem. I think more like just not a "gem" of a cpu.

Luck man. RGone...ster.

 

[scottie2d]

Prime95

I was able to run prime95 overnight and it is stable at 4.2ghz. It errors out in about a minute at 4.4. I will just leave it at 4.2. The overclock is decent and the temps are great. Thanks for your help and that Asus boards looks great.

 

[moustd]

i recently built a computer as my first ever dedicated gaming PC (fx 4100, 6950 2gb, 8gb gskill sniper) and im pretty pleased, i did a minor overclock - 4ghz at stock voltage with coolermaster TX3 and iv never had a single lockup of anything, and run idle 30C and max 65C after 3 hour p95

 

[SpiderCraved]

i've been able to get my 4100 to 4.6 with no issues so far and running at what i think to be a good temp, i just cant get my video card or ram to oc

 

[Dlaw]

My power suppy is a diablotek UL series 775 watt and attached are the screenshots:

Did you say DIABLOTEK?! I would focus on a new PSU before a new board. Sure, the board could be the issue, but I've heard of Diablotek PSUs dying in such a manor as to take EVERYTHING connected to it out with it. You can get a decent 600w PSU from OCZ for $75 here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341017

 

[brbchurch]

After completing the oc, should I enable the power saving settings in BIOS like cool and quite and c6?