How much will I be able to overclock an fx 6300 3.5Ghz with the M5A97 r2.0 motherboard?

Currently have an FX-6300 clocked at 4.4 using a 212 EVO, this is pretty much the max that our chip can go to without hitting well... 'unsafe' thermal levels as specified by AMD. Temperatures range from 28-31 idle to 60-65 under prime95 for 30 minutes for the CPU itself and core temperatures of 25-28 idle and 55-60 under prime95.

Our settings are something along the lines of 22 multiplier and 1.385+ volts, it was not stable for anything under this setting.

At 4.2 ghz it should be absolutely attainable without too much difficulty at around 1.375 volts as another poster above stated, just be sure to run P95 and or another program to stress the CPU to ensure you're within your thermal limits, AMD's 'safe temperatures' seem far lower than those on Intel chips. Recall we had temperatures of about 25-28 and 55-60 as at 4.2.

Just manually adjust voltage and multiplier till you find a setting that is stable - by stable, we mean can survive a prime95 blend test for at least 6 hours without overheating and or having core errors. Errors show up fast typically and are almost always a sign of undervoltage - if you get illegal sumouts, increase voltage.

Performance difference? IMO, you will not notice that much difference, maybe 1-2 FPS in games, you will notice a difference in CPU intensive stuff like rendering, encoding, and the like but if you're gaming? Not much will change. Although it's not a reliable measure of actual system performance, using Windows 7's system rating, 3.5 to 4.4 ghz only bumped the processor rating from 7.4 to 7.5 for example. Response times will be faster, boot up times will be faster (or maybe it's just imaginary) etc, so yes it will be faster, but it will be so minuscule that you probably will not notice. Likely this is due to turbo on the stock which goes to 4.2 ghz already so figure if you overclock it's rather pointless unless you take it beyond 4.2.

As for bottleneck, not sure, in the process of running some benchmarks as we've got the same question only that it's on an R9 390 instead of a 970 GTX (although the 390 is arguably slightly better than the GTX). If there's no bottleneck, then might as well just wait for the zen core next year and see if Jim Keller pulls another Athlon 64 out of thin air instead of go for skylake currently. Given his track record, well, at least this time round have some more solid ground to be optimistic as AMD has really been a letdown for the last 6 years. We need more competition to drive prices down.

Personally saw a 20+ fps boost in Skyrim/BF4 (don't play GTA) after an upgrade from a R9 270x -> R9 390, the over clock did close to nothing, but like that was due to the GPU already being bottlenecked. CPU usage was never particularly high in either game, GPU capped out wtih the 270x, the 390 currently reaches 90%+ usage levels with the CPU at 50-75% max.

Anyways, have reset everything to stock to do some before and after benchmarks.

Here are stock figures on the FX6300/R9 390 combo





The min FPS rates are during the scene changes, otherwise they are normally steady at 40-50.

Will overclock again later and run these again.