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alright, i have an Athlon II X4 620 2.6GHz native, with an MSI 770-G45 board, the board features an "easy-OC' jumper with Default, 10%, 15%, and 20% overclock options. 20% is shown below with a lower HT ratio bringing it to 2160 instead of 2400MHz (unstable). this is a very strange board, in that it does not have an Vdroop, at all, in fact, it raises the vcore above what is set in BIOS, as much as 3 notches. if its set to 1.39v default, it jumps to 1.424, 1.416, or 1.432 depending on the workload(more usage=higher vcore) this is with the stock cpu cooler as well.



is it worth it to have a lower HT for a higher total Frequency? i assumed that HT was similar to FSB in that it is more important than overall GHz, but the last AMD chip i OC'ed was an Athlon XP 2.08GHz skt A, and i've also never used a quad either. would it be worth it to lower the multiplier? its 13 default but goes by increments of .5 down to 11 then 10, 9, 8 etc.

Start by testing max HTT. I've never used that board but I'm confident in saying 300HTT should easily be possible, if not higher. Set your core, northbridge, and HTT multipliers very low. Once you are certain about that then pump up the core clocks, 3.6GHz should be a piece of cake for a C2 Phenom II. Don't worry about voltages now, set 1.5v and get the cores locked in at 1.5v. Then work on your CPU-NB, 2.5 to 2.8GHz should be do-able, this really affects performance. For this pump up your CPU-NB volts, I think you'll need around 1.3v to 1.35v for 2.8GHz. Lastly pump the HTT multi and get it around 2GHz. Since this only dictates throughput to the PCIe controller it doesn't directly affect CPU performance, just throughput to the GPUs and HDDs. Once the CPU is stable at your desired settings start lowering voltages and testing stability.

Hope that helps!

Strange voltages indeed. Have you tried using a multimeter or updating the BIOS? How about contacting MSI?

currently settling on this for now, i fooled with it for like 5 hrs, got a max Bus speed of 290, maybe i'll push it more with aftermarket cooling, but the board is limiting me. i can bump it up a couple MHz, but i've spent enough time, and already fubar'd my main Win 7 install (mostly back to normal now, have my GPU clients back up, VMware still needs to be set up again)

Damn 3.5Ghz. That's just 100Mhz shy of a 1Ghz overclock. It is 300Mhz higher than what AnandTech was able to get with their Athlon II X4 620 when it was released, but they used only 1.4Vcore. What's your temps at right now?

Also, how's the Athlon II compared to the E7200?

i havnt run a single benchmark yet, and i'm sick now so i dont particularly want to, but i just went back down to 3.12GHz with the Board's 20% OC feature because i couldnt get it to pass the OCCT small data test for more than a minute, but i'll work on it some more with an aftermarket cooler. i do know that my VMWare SMP times are much better with the quad

my temps are 27C idle, 47C load at 3.12

Oooh get well soon.

Time to fiddle with the voltages a bit more haha. What cooler you planning to get? I recommend Cooler Master Hyper 212+. It's cheap, yet it'll keep your chip VERY cool. No need to spend like $70 on a TRUE or anything like that.

Yeah get the Hyper or scythe mugen-2 rev. b its just 10$ more than hyper but also very cool :D
and i think u should not use the onboard overcloking thingy... just do it manually in the bios and keep it at 3.2Ghz till u get a new cooler :D
i OC'ed my athlon to 3.2 for few hours with a vcore at 1.4** and on stock cooler, my temps were 73 C so i made it 2.95

hades the gamer wrote:Yeah get the Hyper or scythe mugen-2 rev. b its just 10$ more than hyper but also very cool :D
and i think u should not use the onboard overcloking thingy... just do it manually in the bios and keep it at 3.2Ghz till u get a new cooler :D
i OC'ed my athlon to 3.2 for few hours with a vcore at 1.4** and on stock cooler, my temps were 73 C so i made it 2.95

i have a few coolers i'm lookin at, prolly stay under $30 tho as im not sure if imma get a SSD, or an HD5770 1GB, or maybe even a DICE pot along with it. And you're talkin the dualcore, that should OC Better since it only has two cores to work with, instead of 4 (and my temps havnt broke 50C yet, even at 3.6(for a short time)so im not too certain temps are my problem)

skier wrote:

hades the gamer wrote:Yeah get the Hyper or scythe mugen-2 rev. b its just 10$ more than hyper but also very cool :D
and i think u should not use the onboard overcloking thingy... just do it manually in the bios and keep it at 3.2Ghz till u get a new cooler :D
i OC'ed my athlon to 3.2 for few hours with a vcore at 1.4** and on stock cooler, my temps were 73 C so i made it 2.95

i have a few coolers i'm lookin at, prolly stay under $30 tho as im not sure if imma get a SSD, or an HD5770 1GB, or maybe even a DICE pot along with it. And you're talkin the dualcore, that should OC Better since it only has two cores to work with, instead of 4 (and my temps havnt broke 50C yet, even at 3.6(for a short time)so im not too certain temps are my problem)

hmmmm then the HYPER 212 IS THE COOLER FOR U :D
and yeah m talkin abt the daual core but the athlon's are not good OC'rs untill u ve a extremely good board and COOLER... i ve a stock old AMD cooler
so yeah 3.0 stable with no temp problems is max with stock cooler :D
and also its a 65nm core..

hades the gamer wrote:

skier wrote:

hades the gamer wrote:Yeah get the Hyper or scythe mugen-2 rev. b its just 10$ more than hyper but also very cool :D
and i think u should not use the onboard overcloking thingy... just do it manually in the bios and keep it at 3.2Ghz till u get a new cooler :D
i OC'ed my athlon to 3.2 for few hours with a vcore at 1.4** and on stock cooler, my temps were 73 C so i made it 2.95

i have a few coolers i'm lookin at, prolly stay under $30 tho as im not sure if imma get a SSD, or an HD5770 1GB, or maybe even a DICE pot along with it. And you're talkin the dualcore, that should OC Better since it only has two cores to work with, instead of 4 (and my temps havnt broke 50C yet, even at 3.6(for a short time)so im not too certain temps are my problem)

hmmmm then the HYPER 212 IS THE COOLER FOR U :D
and yeah m talkin abt the daual core but the athlon's are not good OC'rs untill u ve a extremely good board and COOLER... i ve a stock old AMD cooler
so yeah 3.0 stable with no temp problems is max with stock cooler :D
and also its a 65nm core..

+1

Keep us posted! You could always compare folding frame times as a "benchmark" but then I think the Athlon II would be the obvious winner thanks to its 4 cores. Cores is more important than raw clock speed for folding...

geokilla wrote:+1

Keep us posted! You could always compare folding frame times as a "benchmark" but then I think the Athlon II would be the obvious winner thanks to its 4 cores. Cores is more important than raw clock speed for folding...

yeah 4cores it is :D

well, the MSI 770-G45 seems to have some serious issues, it stopped being stable, at even stock clocks, so i'm going to return it for a Gigabyte 790X board

GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4 AM3


its a little bit pricier at $139 but i just can't go from an Intel Extreme motherboard to a midrange AMD, this new board also offers SATA v3 and USB 3.0, up to DDR3 1800, and dual PCIe slots again, still with good spacing, and it is also on an 8-pin ATX power connector(instead of 4pin that the 770 is) and has better cooling on the PWM and northbridge

skier wrote:well, the MSI 770-G45 seems to have some serious issues, it stopped being stable, at even stock clocks, so i'm going to return it for a Gigabyte 790X board

GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4 AM3


its a little bit pricier at $139 but i just can't go from an Intel Extreme motherboard to a midrange AMD, this new board also offers SATA v3 and USB 3.0, up to DDR3 1800, and dual PCIe slots again, still with good spacing, and it is also on an 8-pin ATX power connector(instead of 4pin that the 770 is) and has better cooling on the PWM and northbridge

Great board man..... wish i could get it
but guess i ve to stick with the low end ones

well, i got a new 620 from AMD today, and its VID reports 1.225v instead of 1.400v like the old one did, but i just did a little OC session and got the max bootable for this setup:

3.770GHz
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1058655



could probably go a little higher with my voltage, but i dont know much about this chip, with a 1.225v VID, 1.55v seems like i shouldnt go much higher, i did get a successful 32M WPrime @ 3.51GHz (11.943 s)

but my stable clock that i'm currently at(for temperature reasons, dont want to be over 58C load, and an even 3.3GHz makes the temps jump to 64C load):


i might not be stable with the 2500MHz HT though- havn't done enough testing there

How'd you get a new one from AMD? What was wrong with the old one? o.O

That overclock seems not too bad, but lots of people seem to be hitting like 3.8Ghz....

geokilla wrote:How'd you get a new one from AMD? What was wrong with the old one? o.O

That overclock seems not too bad, but lots of people seem to be hitting like 3.8Ghz....

well its a one-in-10-million kinda story on that, starting with a broken pin....

and i had mentioned i hadn't had the chip for more than 10hrs before i did that run, and i didnt have very cold air to work with


on another note, taking comparisons between [Phenom II X2 7mb cache @3.813GHz]/[Athlon II X4 2mb cache @3.250GHz]:

Vantage CPU score: 6,511/10,451 (Multi threaded)
3DM'06 CPU score: 3,017/4,375 (Multi threaded)
superpi 1M: 18.65s/24.25s (single threaded)
wprime 32m: 23.74s/23.92s (both @ 2threads, 12.9s for Athlon @4threads)
wprime1024m: 12.8min/6.57min (Multi threaded)

I have an HP p6214y and when I go to the BIOS>Advanced settings, there are no options for overclocking or anything. Is there a tool or software to do it?
Also, I have a question with unlocking L3 caching on this CPU like this. How do I do it if the CPU name is not selectable in the BIOS advanced settings?
Here is the specs for my system.
Thanks for all answers!

shamRock wrote:I have an HP p6214y and when I go to the BIOS>Advanced settings, there are no options for overclocking or anything. Is there a tool or software to do it?
Also, I have a question with unlocking L3 caching on this CPU like this. How do I do it if the CPU name is not selectable in the BIOS advanced settings?
Here is the specs for my system.
Thanks for all answers!

You won't be able to get all the advanced/overclocking BIOS features with your PC. In fact, all the OEM pre-built PC (Acer, Gateway, HP, Compaq, etc.) have most/all the features removed or disabled...because they don't want people to accidentally destroy their computer.

There are softwares out there that allows you to adjust the Bus/FSB frequency TEMPORARYILY (resets after reboot), but..it isn't very good at all compared to doing it in the BIOS. Plus, you can only adjust the FSB and nothing else (voltages, RAM frequency, etc).

The program that I used for my Acer PC to give it a small overclock was called "setFSB." Make sure your particular computer model/motherboard is supported by the program - can be checked by looking at their looong support list.
http://www13.plala.or.jp/setfsb/

You can only unlock the L3 cache if your chip was orginally a Phenom II chip; what I mean is, you were lucky to get one of the PhenomII turned into Athlon II chips (to meet market demands or disable some of the defetive pats to make it a Athlon II). The Phenom II's were the AM3 CPus that had L3 cache.
You'll need a motherboard with the advanced BIOS AND the "Unlocking" feature present to be able to do this.

Basically, you need a new motherboard (non-OEM, retail, boxed ones) to properly overclock and to unlock the L3 cache...