AMD FX-8120 Overclocking Issues

JustinKoker

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A while back when i upgraded my system I went with the 8120 because of the 8-cores for editing purposes. Now my system has become more of a gaming rig but I do stream to Twitch with OBS.

I noticed that there are some games where other people who have systems that no where compare to mine get better performance or performance that is par with mine. My issue comes from me trying to overclock my CPU over 3.8Ghz. I have a Corsair H100 and never normally see my processor ever go higher than about 35C on load. I have been able to get the clock as high as 4.5 and have windows still start but normally it will crash within a few minutes or if i try to run a game or program in general. It will give me a BSOD with the error message "there was a clock interrupt on a secondary processor".

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 Rev 01. i believe and i just upgraded not long ago from 2 GTX 460 1GB Fermi's in SLI to a single AMD Radeon 7950 HD 3GB thinking i would see a performance difference, but there was really no noticeable difference in the games i have played.

Idk if my CPU can somehow be bottlenecking my performance or if I just need a higher clock but a lot of games like torchlight 2 that my system should demolish i get on the lowest settings maybe between 30-60. Whereas a friend of mine who only has an intel I3 and a GTX 550 sits on high settings above 100 consistently. Then games like L4D2 another friend runs a single gtx 460 and my system gets about 60 frames less overall on the same settings. So I am not sure why my performance seems to be outmatch by lower end system and if my CPU is at blame or if my CPU is faulty because I cannot clock any higher than 3.8 without crashing
 

chrisafp07

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Hmm very odd that those lower end systems are getting higher fps than you are in those games (Even though an i3 is completely suitable for most games).

Before doing anything else, I would download HWinfo64 (To find your bottleneck), run the program, load sensors only. Take a look at the interface and notice it will give you Utilization percentages for you RAM, CPU, and GPU. Reset the values and then boot Witcher 2 or L4D2 and play for about 5 minutes, attempting to strees your system. After 5 minutes close the game and check your usage percentages, then you will know your bottleneck :)
 

wdmfiber

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8350rocks

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While the Bulldozer was not great...the FX8350 will not bottleneck anything on max settings...and you're talking about bottlenecking eyefinity in that article...which is a COMPLETELY different thing than bottlenecking a single GPU, even the i7-3770k by your definition will "bottleneck" eyefinity according to that review.


@OP: Your 8120 sounds like you're not stable in your OC, something is off somewhere if your system crashes.

The error screen you're getting leads me to believe that your voltage is off a tad somewhere. I would make some adjustments and tweak it a bit more. The FX series are notoriously good overclockers, so you should be able to get into the 4.2-4.5 GHz range on your cooling setup without issue at all. I would say try adjusting your OC some and see if you can get it to run IBT or Prime95 several times and remain stable.
 

wdmfiber

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@1080p on Skyrim the FX8350 scores less than half the fps of the i7.
59 fps vs. 123
Granted on some other games it was ok. But it will bottleneck powerfull future GPU's even more. Maxwell(nVidia) and Volcanic Islands(AMD).

Sadly, AMD as a company is in real trouble and they already announced they can on longer compete with Intel on the high end: Quote: "There is no interest at AMD to continue a processor war with Intel that has lasted decades, but only rewarded AMD with occasional superiority"
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-apu-processors,15741.html

Tom's does a lot of hard work to keep readers informed so they don't buy poor products.
 

8350rocks

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Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim...that's the only review any intel nut can point toward where there's any difference...

How about Crysis 3 where the 8350 beats the i7-3770k? Far Cry 3 where the difference is less than 3 fps? Metro 2033 where the 8350 actually beats the i7-3770k in some benchmarks, and in others it runs a real tight race? BF3 where the difference in frame rate is 1 fps? Bioshock Infinite where the FX8350 beats the intels?

But you don't want to point those out, since either by your standards no one plays those, or they don't count, or it would just point out your fallacy in your claim. I don't care which it is, stop spreading BS information that's grossly inaccurate and highly misleading.

AMD is in great shape...steamroller launches Q4 2013 and GCN is coming this year as well as having unified gaming concept's cloud system coming out soon. In addition, AMD just launched the first "Open Source Hardware" server that is the most energy to performance efficient server architecture in the world, and it's fully scalable and modular.

AMD is going nowhere...

 

chrisafp07

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+1

The facts are out there, go get educated people. The 8350 is probably just starting to compete as well, with new consoles running multi-core AMD hardware. Would anyone who loves Intel so much really want AMD to go away thereby creating a monopoly? That would be bad for Intel as well, competition is good.
 

JustinKoker

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How will i know how to read it and see where the bottleneck is? Is there a way I can save the 2 different comparisons and post them on here?
 

8350rocks

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Where ever your usage is 98-100% is the weakest link...anything running below 90% is being held back by the component at 100%
 

chrisafp07

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HWinfo64 will show you gpu, cpu, and ram utilization percentages if you load sensors. That way you can stress your system and see what is at 100% use, like 8350rocks has stated above. Just make sure when you boot the program that you check the load sensors only box.