Overclocking

Overclocking

The fun news about the FX series processors is that they will all come unlocked. That means the CPU multiplier is unlocked allowing you to easily gain a little extra performance.

Overclocking wise you could use AMD OverDrive, but a true guru does his magic in the BIOS. With the new Turbo states you could alter the Max core but for ease of use we simply disable the Turbo mode altogether as we want a constant overclock on all eight cores.

We got the processor running up to 4700 MHz on all eight cores with a liquid cooler (the default AMD kit).

Some generic overclocking guidelines in the BIOS:

• Disable Turbo mode
• Disable APM Master
• Disable thermal states
• Set CPU voltage anywhere from 1.4V to 1.55V (make sure you have enough cooling!)
• Set DDR memory voltage 0.10V higher for increased stability. E.g. 1.55V would be 1.65V
• Increase the base multiplier towards your preference e.g. 200 x a MP of 23 is 4600 MHz

Again, make sure you have cooled your CPU and motherboard well. Don't skimp on cheap thermal paste.

We now incrementally increase the CPU base multiplier and end up at a bus speed of 200 x 23.5 multiplier - 4700 MHz. To achieve this we needed 1.46 Volts on the processor.

At this voltage level in combo with eight cores, the liquid cooler was able to keep the CPU cores low at roughly 50 Degrees C under massive multi-threaded CPU stress (Prime95).

If, during this overclock, your system shuts down, that's a new protection from AMD. You've reached either the heat, TDP or OCP limit (this seems to happen once the CPU pulls more than 26.5A from the 12V CPU rails (8pin and 4pin connectors). If that happens decrease the voltage a bit.

On the ASUS board tested today, when using the High setting for load line calibration the board should not reach the current protection limit that easily. Our end result on air thus is 4700 MHz on all eight cores. 

The power draw however is intense as at this stage we consume roughly 356 Watts by stressing all eight CPU cores.

Performance differences. So for overclocking we quickly ran a multithreadedcontetn creation test (CineBEnch) and the less CPU bound Far Cry 2. Have a peek.

As you can see overclocked the CPU reaches Ivy Bridge 3770K performance in Cinebench. The title is of course a multi-threaded monster, and that is something the FX series really likes. 

Gamign wise CPU bound titles and resolutions definitely will benefit from a small overclock. Our framerate on average was boosted 10%