Help with the bulldozer? (fx-8120)

[llllllllllll]

Hi I recently had a friend help me build a gaming pc, I should have taught myself more before letting him aid me but I decided to learn more after.... Bad choice right? Whatever. So I have the amd fx 8120. I have a few questions. I plan on mostly playing skyrim, what is the benefit (if any) of disabling 4 of the cores? Also I don't understand overclocking very well. I assume you need to know my mobo

:[CrossFireX] GigaByte GA-970A-D3 AMD 970 Socket AM3+ ATX Mainboard w/ On/Off Charge, 7.1 Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe X16, 3 PCIe X1 & 2 PCI

Cooling: Asetek 510LC Liquid Cooling System 120MM Radiator & Fan (Enhanced Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA)
with an extra 120mm case fan

How much can I overclock? And how would I go about doing this?

 

[silverliquicity]

Hey

First off, do you have any good reason to disable 4 of the 8 cores?

Second, FX-8120 Oc's well, and you have water cooling so you'd get a speed above an average air Oc.

To overclock your CPU, you need to go into the bios (have a look around and get familiar with it) and find something called "FSB Multiplier" or something like that.

There are millions of in depth guides on how to overclock almost any CPU

 

[Spoony]

40x on the multiplier is a good start at 1.4v

leave it at that and turn off turbo mode, the turn off CE1 so its disabled, also turn the enable cores manually and turn them all on.

4.0Ghz is a really good start its also a good stable platform for gaming and is no point going higher if im honest

 

[rnnoob]

i dont really understand why you want to overclock the fx 8120 will be ale to play skyrim just fine, if its not then it will be the gpu that u should be concerned about
the fx 8120 is a good processor in its own if you gonna game on it..no need to oc
well you can if you want to. but i dont see the point as i oc only when i desperately need the extra horsepower

 

[llllllllllll]

Hey

First off, do you have any good reason to disable 4 of the 8 cores?

Second, FX-8120 Oc's well, and you have water cooling so you'd get a speed above an average air Oc.

To overclock your CPU, you need to go into the bios (have a look around and get familiar with it) and find something called "FSB Multiplier" or something like that.

There are millions of in depth guides on how to overclock almost any CPU

Yeah I heard somewhere disabling 4 let you oc more but I guess not. HOw exactly do I access the bios?

 

[rnnoob]

for most of the mobos its press del to access the bios
othawise its written on the bottom of the screen whn the system boots
and are u sure u are not trolling

 

[loneninja]

Yeah I heard somewhere disabling 4 let you oc more but I guess not. HOw exactly do I access the bios?

Answer to that question is in your motherboards manual, I would really suggest you read that before overclocking.


Also ignore the comment from Spoony to set the multiplier to 40, I don't think he's ever overclocked an AMD system as that would put any AMD processor since the original Athlon 64 at 8.0Ghz, not 4.0Ghz. AMD runs off a bus speed of 200, to get cpu clock speed you multiply the cpu multiplier by the bus speed. A cpu multiplier of 20 is needed for 4.0Ghz as 20 x 200 = 4000. The only 2 settings in your bios you need to adjust are the cpu multiplier and cpu voltage.

xbitlabs.com got the 8120 to 4.5Ghz using 1.392V(probably set to 1.4V in their BIOS), this was done with a multiplier of 22.5.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8120-6100-4100_9.html#sect0

 

[bawchicawawa]

read guides/watch videos and be careful of what you do while OCing.

DL Core Temp so you can monitor your cpu temps. Also DL prime95 so you can stress your cpu to check your max temp/check for instability.

A comfortable temp to stay under while you are running prime95 is 60c