First time overclocking, lots of help needed

hw monitor should be just fine with your cpu, it's universal. Yes, it's still recommended. If I'm not mistaken, the info within hwmonitor is similar to that of cpu-z. Stress testing is important, it ensures that your overclock is successful. The purpose is, you want to make sure your overclock is stable even under load. It's possible to overclock, boot to the desktop and be idling fine until you load a program or game then have the pc crash due to load and instability.

Prime95 is still used, along with occt and intel burn test.

Overclocking should be done one component at a time in my opinion. Otherwise, you go changing everything at once and something doesn't work, the pc crashes and you have no idea where to start looking for the problem. If you do one thing at a time and get it stable, when you do run into a problem you'll know the latest change is what caused it.

You might be able to get to 4ghz, but a couple of things will determine your overclock. Your cooling (you need something better than the stock cooler), your power supply (should be of sound quality), motherboard chipset (the 970 isn't known to be the best and has been known to limit fx-8xxx series cpu's vs the 990 chipset), also the chip lottery. Meaning some cpu chips just naturally overclock better than others and it's luck of the draw. No way to know until you try. You might be stuck at 3.8ghz while your buddy with the exact same parts might hit 4.4ghz. (just an example).

The 212 evo isn't really a massive cooler and might have trouble cooling your cpu during overclocking. The fx-8xxx are a bit on the warm side, higher thermal design (125w) vs the intel i5's for example (84-88w). The fx 8320's are essentially a lower binned chip (slightly lower grade) than the chips they label and sell as 8350's so your overclocking mileage may vary.

Here's one guide on oc'ing the fx 8320. I'm sure there are others and as always, overclocking is at your own risk. Don't just plunge into a major overclock, gently working your way up to it and checking for stability is a safer way to go paying attention to temps and voltages.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1348623/amd-bulldozer-and-piledriver-overclocking-guide-asus-motherboard

Try changing your multiplier and not messing with your voltage. In most cases, as a rough (very rough) example it's something like this. Raise the multiplier a little. Test. Repeat. If the pc crashes at a certain overclock, so long as temps are still within tolerance (around 60c, maybe 70c max under full test load like prime 95), then try upping the voltage just a tiny bit. See if that makes it stable. Once you've reached a certain overclock you're happy with (say 4.4ghz, just a random example) then try to reduce the voltage a tiny bit and keep testing stability until it's no longer stable. Then go back and up the voltage to the last stable voltage. The idea is to try and up the clock rates with the lowest possible stable voltage (stable determined by passing burn tests like p95 without crashing) and keeping temperatures under control. If temps are too high, back off the overclock.

How much is a "little bit" of voltage?
What's a safe temp for this cpu in particular, as you stated higher TDP?
Will overclocking be overall even noticeable? Will my computer start up slightly faster, or games run slightly smoother? If it isn't worth the trouble I won't bother.
Also, how do I find the base clock of my CPU?

Click to expand...

In voltage a little bit is like 0.01 volts.
Safe temp with fx chips under stress tests like prime is 70*C and gaming 62*C
I oc'd my fx-4350 a bit and I got 5-10 FPS boost in different games.
Base clock of your CPU? Use google

Multiplier changes are typically easier than baseclock changes and Tomba_Dude was right, .01, .02v etc are 'little changes'. In terms of cpu voltage since it's already quite low compared to other things, a jump from 1.2-1.3v is a pretty big one. Most people prefer to stay below 1.4 unless they're experienced or have really good cooling and even then there's more to it than keeping a cpu cool. Overvoltage on it's own can be damaging regardless of temps being ok.

Intel burn test should be compatible with amd's, even if you just stuck with occt and prime95 you'd probably be fine. There's a lot of detail involved depending how far you try to overclock which is why I recommend reading up on it to get a better understanding so you know why you're making the changes you're making. It can be tedious but it's better to make one little change at a time. If for instance you raise the multiplier, up the baseclock, raise the voltage all at the same time one of two things - either it will fail to boot or will boot and blue screen due to too severe of an overclock and you won't know which factor caused it. Or you'll get a stable overclock but it may be running higher voltage than necessary and fine tuning with stress testing could have you running the same overclock at a lower voltage which translates to similar performance while running cooler (voltage = heat). The reason for such small voltage increases, inside a cpu are billions of transistors. The higher the voltage, the more heat and while .01 or .02v may sound insignificant that tiny bit of extra heat is multiplied by those billions of transistors and has an effect on overall heat output.