Overclocking my 955 BE

[darcangelorr]

I'm a noob when it comes to overclocking - I originally purchased Phenom II X4 955 BE chip a while ago but havent tried to overclock because I wasnt confident in stock cooling and tight case. Just fixed that. Here's the specs on my rig:

MSI 790XT-G45 Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE CPU w/ Cool Master 212 Hyper+ Fan & Heatsink
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR2 PC6400 RAM
(2) MSI 1GB Radeon HD 5770 Video cards
CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W 80+ Certified PSU
COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Full Tower Case

Well I could use a little help. My bios is supposed to make overclocking easy however there are a TON of options on overclocking. For example, there is a CPU clock muliplier and a CPU NB clock muliplier. Do I change both or leave the NB one on Auto? For the CPU Voltage there seems to be two line items for it - one changing percentages (in both positive and negative directions) and the other changing actual voltages, although they are preset voltage settings to pick from - you can't just decrease/increase incrementally.

It appears on Auto my CPU is receiving 1.4V. I've tried to increase the multiplier to 19X to achieve 3.8GHz. I load and boot into windows fine at that point but will fail a Prime95 stress test about 10min into it.

Any input is greatly appreciated!

 

[bigbang]

overclocking is like doing an experiment, you want to change things one by one and see the effects on the system. there are general guides available or you can do it yourself. if you want the guides, just google "overclocking Phenom II" or overclocking "ur mother board name" and youll most likely see someone posting their findings.
if you want to do it yourself, you keep all parameters set at some well defined value, and experiment with them one by one, ie increase cpu voltage/fsb, then find out how performance is improved/stable. i do warn you however, doing it yourself is considered moronic in some cultures. it could also be really timeconsuming.
but the point im trying to make is, if you forexample let your ram voltage be automatically defined by the mobo, and you increase the fsb, the computer might crash, but you dont know if its because you increased the fsb or that the mobo increased the voltage on ram too high which made the system stable. obviously its most like the fsb problem but thats the whole point of an experiment, to remove all uncertainty. happy hunting.
you may find these useful:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119-3.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/258573-11-black-edition-overclock-guide

 

[darcangelorr]

Definitely good advice big bang. I actually started down that road about two days ago and scoured the internet - finding many articles that relate and offer info however, nothing that seems to really help me to change my settings on my particular BIOS - there are so damn many - like for example the fact that there are two items that says CPU Voltage that you are able to change. wtf? Sometimes things become a whole lot easier if you can find someone who has done it before with the same setup. Here's to hoping! Until then, I will continue to take your advice and try a very methodical step by step approach with the help of the info I found on the net.

 

[bigbang]

i would say start of by setting the memory voltage manually to what it is by default, disable spread spectrum, set cpu voltage to 0.2 higher than what it is by default, turn of cool'n quiet, set a fixed CPU-NB ratio (whatever it is on default), increase CPU ratio by 4-5, manually enter the DRAm settings by whatever they are as default or your memories SPD, keep going higher until you reach the numbers u see in the article i linked

 

[loneninja]

If you change your cpu core voltage to 1.45V you'll probably be stable at 3.8Ghz. Set the one that has an actual value, don't mess with percentages.