all right guys so stock CPU performance of the AMD FX 8150 bulldozer CPU has
been examined already at this time now we are going to have a look at how high
we can overclock one of these chips and
then what kind of performance we can squeeze out of it so for cooling I'm
going to be using a Corsair h100 you can't really see what's lit up there you
go in the highest performance profile okay so that's installed on the 8150
I've got my MSI 990 fxa gd80 motherboard
here the reason I chose this one over the Crosshair 5 was due to the fact that
I really like the way the BIOS is laid out and I'm actually going to do a video
about click BIOS 2 which is what they're what they're calling this particular
layout um in an upcoming video it's oh
whoops that's not what I meant to do uh it's pretty cool though actually just
the way way that you navigate around is much much faster than other EFI BIOS
implementations and it's also much faster than the old way of doing things
which was the traditional BIOS so I'm very very impressed so far you can
either use the mouse or the keyboard although I think keyboard is a little bit faster but uh yeah very very cool so
stay tuned guys remember overclocking on
the FX series chips all of them is quite easy basically the only settings that
we're really going to be looking at I've turned off OC Genie I've turned off all
of that automated stuff but we're pretty much going to be looking at CPU ratio
right here okay and that's not going to be Auto by the time we're done it's 18
by default I'm turning off turbo core technology as well just so that I don't
have any additional curve balls thrown in I'm just looking for straight eight
cores all enabled all at the same frequency how high can we overclock I've
got my DDR3 at 1600 MHz so I'm using hyperx Genesis from
Kingston okay moving down everything is going to be pretty
default except we're disabling spread spectrum and we are going to be
adjusting CPU voltage as needed in order
to get stability at the settings that we're trying so why don't we go ahead
and uh change the CPU ratio
to 22 and we'll leave it at default
voltage and see what happens just as a starting experiment I'll bring you guys
along for the ride for this whole video so you can see how the overclocking
experience is on the FX series
chip booted up at 4.4 GHz but yeah that
definitely wasn't going to happen at stock voltage so the voltage has turned
up to 1.45 in the BIOS uh you can see
CPU Z is reading quite a bit lower but you can take any software voltage
readings with a huge grain of salt so I'm going to go ahead and find out if
this particular voltage is is at least somewhat stable before I try to move on
any further so here we're just going to check task manager really quick make
sure all of the threads are appropriately loaded which it appears that they are so if this runs for a
couple minutes what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the BIOS crank up the speed a little bit more and see
if I can make it very unstable then I'll scale it back and I do more long-term
testing well I made a critical benchmarking mistake I started benching
without my cat in my lap which he uh
quickly REM so now I will have more luck of course
but I tried at 4.6 GHz at the same voltage settings I was using before
1.45 uh didn't have any luck so I cranked the voltage up a little bit
higher just to see uh what was the limiting factor in the overclock and I
got a no post scenario which I wasn't able to recover from so I had to do a
clear simos which meant all of my settings were restored to factory
default including all my boot settings and all that which is a good lesson
because I'm about to show you guys why you should always use overclocking
profile so we're going to go ahead and with every oh whoops with everything
default I always use my last overclocking profile for that so set
name we're going to call this default so I haven't changed any performance
settings I mean I've got my RAM set to stock timings manually and I've got my
boot settings all correct I've turned off spread Spectrum so I'm basically
ready for overclocking but I haven't done anything yet so that that means
that if I have to clear the SOS again what I can do is I can just go into the
profile down here and then I can load
profile 6 which will get me back to square one without actually being
completely back to square one where I have to do things like turn off the full
screen logo display for example all right so let's get back going here and
I'm going to go ahead I'm not going to put the CPU voltage quite as high this
time so we're going to go with
1.4 so I cranked it up to like 1.5 to
see what would happen but let's go with like 1.4
65 which is pretty high pretty high this is like I would call this not
necessarily 24/7 safe but we'll have a look at what kind of temperatures we end
up with before we say that for sure and then let's aim for
4.6 or 4.8 Wait no that's not right 4.6 gigz
see what happens here
so here's a quirky thing that is just it's one of those things that happen
sometimes you can see we're at 4.6 GHz now booted into Windows I have increased
the core voltage to 1.48 something I believe in the BIOS
which is very high like I said before be be careful increasing voltage like this
but uh no matter what we did with the voltage by increasing the multiplier
more I was not able to get stability but by increasing the bus speed now I booted
into Windows so sometimes it is a combination between bus speed and
multiplier that is going to get you the best stability now what I did do just to
make sure that memory is not the limiting factors I turned it down to
1333 MHz so it's a different divider so
that um yeah so that I can rule that out as
the as the problem if we do run into stability because otherwise it would be overclocking the memory now I do have a
slight overclock on the hypertransport blast as well as uh what is it there's
something else that's slightly overclocked now that I've done this but I'm not going to worry too much about
that so let's go ahead and fire up Prime 95 and see if we have any stability
whatsoever at these settings and my
mouse froze it looks like we do not so I might have a bit of a dud of a chip uh
here's a luxury that I have that you guys don't I'm going to go ahead I'm going to try throwing it in the
Crosshair 5 and I'm going to see if the results I get are any different right
now it looks like my limit on this particular CPU is going to be around the
4.4 to 4.5 GHz range all right so here I am in the
Crosshair 5 BIOS and I'm going to try
straight for 4.6 GHz with the there you
go Target CPU frequency 4.6 GHz with my
um with 1.45 volts just to see what happens and then here we go 1.45 volts
to see what happens and I also made another critical mistake in benchmarking
I got out of my chair and now there are two grooming cats in it who don't look
like they are likely to
move lo and behold we have a little bit of
stability at 4.6 GHz so it's still running I'm going to go ahead and stop
it now and let's see if we can push it any further on this particular
board well I tried another full multiplier for 4.8 and that was not
stable but I dialed it back 0.5 of a multiplier to 232 and we're at 4.7 and
it's been priming for a little while now now one thing that makes me kind of
uncomfortable about FX overclocking right now is I don't really have an
accurate way to monitor processor uh excuse me processor
temperatures because I know for a fact that is not right there's no way with
the temperature of the water on the h100 that that is anywhere near right it's
got to be significantly higher than that so um that worries me a little bit so I
don't think I want to push the voltage too much higher given that 1.45 is the
max I see most others doing right now but maybe I'll give it a little bit more
and maybe I'll try increasing the bus speed rather than the multiplier to see
how much closer we can get to that 4.8 GHz Mark or even the magic 5 GHz who
knows well I accidentally oh this looks like cool and quiet's on but I'll just
move this around to generate some CPU load there you go I accidentally dialed
up the bus speed faster than I had intended to and we ended up at 4.95 GHz
and it booted into Windows miraculously so uh we did run into a bit of a a bit
of a hiccup where increasing the multiplier wasn't getting me the stability I needed but increasing the
bus speed sort of did but I mean I am not
expecting this to have any manner of stability in Prime 9 I expected it to
Crash by now and it hasn't so look at
that we are up near the 5 gigahertz Mark
let's see if we can get there and let's find out how stable it is I said I
wasn't going to do it but I did have to give it some more voltage to get into
Windows at 5 GHz so here you go we are
at 5 GHz it's 1.4
75 in the BIOS right now so let's see if
we have any Prime stability whatsoever I really doubt it but still fun to see a 5
gz suicide shot so there you have it in
terms of what we were actually able to achieve with any stability I'd say 4.8
GHz is very doable um thank you for checking out my little walkthrough on
overclocking the bulldozer FX 8150 don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips
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