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

[Orangehat44]

oh no sir you are no moron lol. and im happy to go slow i dont mind being timid about this as i have always been very terrified doing anything in bios lol, but i do love this asus bios much more user friendly. I'm a mechanical engineer... electricity and circuit boards can terrify us Mech E's. and work for a CNC builder and have seen machine panels goo up in smoke. usually wiring errors there we dont really overclock CNC controllers lol.

id rather double check than guess

 

[caddi daddi]

not to worry, I'm slow and one step at a time.
here on the amd side of this forum we use large safety margins and others will be looking in often making sure we are going in the right direction, like shrimpbrine.
if someone jumps in and refutes something I have typed, look at their name and if you see more than 4 stars under their name that's a good sign that you should listen to them and I may have made a mistake.

 

[Orangehat44]

so when i went to edit that field... the max allowable setting was .7 despite when i switched it from manual to offset mode it was reading 1.175



Have i already messed up lol?

Side note am i suppose to go into 'advanced>cpuconfiguration' and change the power setting stuff, in past guides i read this was done early and just wanted to make sure i should or shouldnt do it yet.

Like set:
Cool n Quiet to disabled
C1e to disabled
SVM to disabled
Core c6 stae to disabled
hpc mode enabled
and apm master mod disabled.

was something i had read in a guide somewhere as an early step.

 

[caddi daddi]

we'll get there.
you are using stock cooling, I think so some of that stuff is good right now.

on my saberpuss I can add lots and lots so press the key two or three times and see what happens.
this adds that much voltage to the base voltage.

to take a screenshot in the bios, plug a usb flash drive in, press the f12 key to save it to the drive, use paint to convert the bmp to png.

this is mine.

 

[Orangehat44]

So is it adding the value you set as the offset to the volt number in the left column? so in your case its 1.150V+.05625=1.20625? i went in and mine was at 1.175v and i hit the + button 2x so +.0125 (which if my addition assumption is correct is 1.1875 so should i go in and crank it more? or should we look at certain things first?

 

[caddi daddi]

yes, till you get close to 1.25

- - - Updated - - -

this is my bios setup for a basic, stable 3.8 clock with my thuban.

 

[Orangehat44]

Okay upped offset to .0875 and now the column on the left says 1.25v. Do i need to monitor something or show a picture of a cpuz tab or something?

 

[caddi daddi]

nope, look at how I have things set to manual, how I have the digi power control set up, how I have the ram timming set up.
copy it and load it with prime 95 and see how your does.
it's time for me to go, I'll look in tomorrow. and I am sure someone else will be glad to answer any questions you might have.

 

[Orangehat44]

okay i matched all my settings to yours, except leaveing my cpu/nb offset where we set it at to get 1.25 (or should i have set it like yours?)
but my cpu configuration had 3 more options i didnt touch but dont know if i should:

Core C6 State 'says it reduces cpu power consumption' currently enabled
HPC mode (high power computing mode) currently disabled
APM master mod currently on auto (app power mananagment or something like that)

But left them as is. and like i said left my offest to equal 1.25v on the cpu/nb voltage. everything else matched to your pictures.

Ran prime blend test for 5 min, 0 errors 0 warnigns but all temperature monitors were agreeing i was around 80c on the cpu so i shut it off.

edit: case prob could use a blowout and my can of crapped out quick will grab one tomororrw and try to clean this out better see if that improves cooling.. ive seen worse, but it cant be helping me

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Say.... what is the cooling you are using? Just curious. Cause 70-80c is way too hot imo.

 

[Orangehat44]

Far as I can tell stock. Buddy thought he had given me a better cooler he hadn't installed it but I couldn't find it in the Tupperware of stuff he gave me with it. And like I said its a bit dusty some fins could use a blowout which I'll do tomorrow.

With the updated settings I do seem to notice better heat performance under normal gaming

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I suggest that you look into an after market cooler. It will make this experience much more enjoyable.

 

[caddi daddi]

big ditto, shrimpbrine.

with the fx cpu you have more features than my older thuban so things will not be the same.
fire it up, run p95 and give us a screenshot of hardware monitor and cpu tabs, cpu, memory and spd after about 5 minutes and we will start trying to tame the heat some.

 

[Bluefalcon13]

I'd wager a CM 212 evo would cool that 4300 down nicely. Keeps my 8320e well under threshold @4.2ghz.

 

[caddi daddi]

order a new cooler and start lowering the cpu vcore two clicks and retest.

 

[Orangehat44]

Alright! all is good and I've learned a valuable lesson to up my pc cleaning frequency. Got home from work and gave her a healthy clean out and there was more dust in the cpu fins than i care to admit... just ran p95 for ~10 min, it says 9... and hw monitor never showed it go above 50C. And watching amd overdrive seemed even better as the margins dipped into the high twenties then stablized at ~30c thermal margin (which if i'm doing my maths right 70-30=40c??) anyway heres the shots let me know if i missed something

 

[caddi daddi]

now go set the ram to 1866 speed, restest,
set the cpu/nb speed to 2600, retest.

 

[Orangehat44]

do ram first then retest? do you need to see anything or if i dont get scary temps go on to CPU/NB change?

 

[Orangehat44]

Umm minor panic turned ram to 1866 and now won't boot black screen can't get to bios

 

[Bluefalcon13]

Umm minor panic turned ram to 1866 and now won't boot black screen can't get to bios

Clear CMOS. Should be procedure within the motherboard manual.