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all right guys so stock CPU performance of the AMD FX 8150 bulldozer CPU has

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been examined already at this time now we are going to have a look at how high

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we can overclock one of these chips and

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then what kind of performance we can squeeze out of it so for cooling I'm

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going to be using a Corsair h100 you can't really see what's lit up there you

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go in the highest performance profile okay so that's installed on the 8150

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I've got my MSI 990 fxa gd80 motherboard

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here the reason I chose this one over the Crosshair 5 was due to the fact that

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I really like the way the BIOS is laid out and I'm actually going to do a video

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about click BIOS 2 which is what they're what they're calling this particular

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layout um in an upcoming video it's oh

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whoops that's not what I meant to do uh it's pretty cool though actually just

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the way way that you navigate around is much much faster than other EFI BIOS

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implementations and it's also much faster than the old way of doing things

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which was the traditional BIOS so I'm very very impressed so far you can

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either use the mouse or the keyboard although I think keyboard is a little bit faster but uh yeah very very cool so

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stay tuned guys remember overclocking on

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the FX series chips all of them is quite easy basically the only settings that

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we're really going to be looking at I've turned off OC Genie I've turned off all

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of that automated stuff but we're pretty much going to be looking at CPU ratio

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right here okay and that's not going to be Auto by the time we're done it's 18

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by default I'm turning off turbo core technology as well just so that I don't

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have any additional curve balls thrown in I'm just looking for straight eight

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cores all enabled all at the same frequency how high can we overclock I've

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got my DDR3 at 1600 MHz so I'm using hyperx Genesis from

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Kingston okay moving down everything is going to be pretty

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default except we're disabling spread spectrum and we are going to be

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adjusting CPU voltage as needed in order

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to get stability at the settings that we're trying so why don't we go ahead

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and uh change the CPU ratio

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to 22 and we'll leave it at default

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voltage and see what happens just as a starting experiment I'll bring you guys

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along for the ride for this whole video so you can see how the overclocking

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experience is on the FX series

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chip booted up at 4.4 GHz but yeah that

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definitely wasn't going to happen at stock voltage so the voltage has turned

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up to 1.45 in the BIOS uh you can see

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CPU Z is reading quite a bit lower but you can take any software voltage

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readings with a huge grain of salt so I'm going to go ahead and find out if

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this particular voltage is is at least somewhat stable before I try to move on

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any further so here we're just going to check task manager really quick make

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sure all of the threads are appropriately loaded which it appears that they are so if this runs for a

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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

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if I can make it very unstable then I'll scale it back and I do more long-term

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testing well I made a critical benchmarking mistake I started benching

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without my cat in my lap which he uh

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quickly REM so now I will have more luck of course

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but I tried at 4.6 GHz at the same voltage settings I was using before

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1.45 uh didn't have any luck so I cranked the voltage up a little bit

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higher just to see uh what was the limiting factor in the overclock and I

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got a no post scenario which I wasn't able to recover from so I had to do a

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clear simos which meant all of my settings were restored to factory

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default including all my boot settings and all that which is a good lesson

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because I'm about to show you guys why you should always use overclocking

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profile so we're going to go ahead and with every oh whoops with everything

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default I always use my last overclocking profile for that so set

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name we're going to call this default so I haven't changed any performance

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settings I mean I've got my RAM set to stock timings manually and I've got my

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boot settings all correct I've turned off spread Spectrum so I'm basically

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ready for overclocking but I haven't done anything yet so that that means

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that if I have to clear the SOS again what I can do is I can just go into the

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profile down here and then I can load

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profile 6 which will get me back to square one without actually being

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completely back to square one where I have to do things like turn off the full

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screen logo display for example all right so let's get back going here and

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I'm going to go ahead I'm not going to put the CPU voltage quite as high this

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time so we're going to go with

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1.4 so I cranked it up to like 1.5 to

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see what would happen but let's go with like 1.4

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65 which is pretty high pretty high this is like I would call this not

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necessarily 24/7 safe but we'll have a look at what kind of temperatures we end

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up with before we say that for sure and then let's aim for

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4.6 or 4.8 Wait no that's not right 4.6 gigz

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see what happens here

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so here's a quirky thing that is just it's one of those things that happen

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sometimes you can see we're at 4.6 GHz now booted into Windows I have increased

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the core voltage to 1.48 something I believe in the BIOS

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which is very high like I said before be be careful increasing voltage like this

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but uh no matter what we did with the voltage by increasing the multiplier

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more I was not able to get stability but by increasing the bus speed now I booted

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into Windows so sometimes it is a combination between bus speed and

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multiplier that is going to get you the best stability now what I did do just to

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make sure that memory is not the limiting factors I turned it down to

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1333 MHz so it's a different divider so

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that um yeah so that I can rule that out as

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the as the problem if we do run into stability because otherwise it would be overclocking the memory now I do have a

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slight overclock on the hypertransport blast as well as uh what is it there's

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something else that's slightly overclocked now that I've done this but I'm not going to worry too much about

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that so let's go ahead and fire up Prime 95 and see if we have any stability

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whatsoever at these settings and my

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mouse froze it looks like we do not so I might have a bit of a dud of a chip uh

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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

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Crosshair 5 and I'm going to see if the results I get are any different right

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now it looks like my limit on this particular CPU is going to be around the

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4.4 to 4.5 GHz range all right so here I am in the

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Crosshair 5 BIOS and I'm going to try

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straight for 4.6 GHz with the there you

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go Target CPU frequency 4.6 GHz with my

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um with 1.45 volts just to see what happens and then here we go 1.45 volts

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to see what happens and I also made another critical mistake in benchmarking

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I got out of my chair and now there are two grooming cats in it who don't look

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like they are likely to

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move lo and behold we have a little bit of

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stability at 4.6 GHz so it's still running I'm going to go ahead and stop

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it now and let's see if we can push it any further on this particular

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board well I tried another full multiplier for 4.8 and that was not

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stable but I dialed it back 0.5 of a multiplier to 232 and we're at 4.7 and

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it's been priming for a little while now now one thing that makes me kind of

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uncomfortable about FX overclocking right now is I don't really have an

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accurate way to monitor processor uh excuse me processor

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temperatures because I know for a fact that is not right there's no way with

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the temperature of the water on the h100 that that is anywhere near right it's

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got to be significantly higher than that so um that worries me a little bit so I

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don't think I want to push the voltage too much higher given that 1.45 is the

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max I see most others doing right now but maybe I'll give it a little bit more

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and maybe I'll try increasing the bus speed rather than the multiplier to see

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how much closer we can get to that 4.8 GHz Mark or even the magic 5 GHz who

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knows well I accidentally oh this looks like cool and quiet's on but I'll just

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move this around to generate some CPU load there you go I accidentally dialed

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up the bus speed faster than I had intended to and we ended up at 4.95 GHz

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and it booted into Windows miraculously so uh we did run into a bit of a a bit

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of a hiccup where increasing the multiplier wasn't getting me the stability I needed but increasing the

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bus speed sort of did but I mean I am not

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expecting this to have any manner of stability in Prime 9 I expected it to

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Crash by now and it hasn't so look at

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that we are up near the 5 gigahertz Mark

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let's see if we can get there and let's find out how stable it is I said I

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wasn't going to do it but I did have to give it some more voltage to get into

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Windows at 5 GHz so here you go we are

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at 5 GHz it's 1.4

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75 in the BIOS right now so let's see if

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we have any Prime stability whatsoever I really doubt it but still fun to see a 5

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gz suicide shot so there you have it in

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terms of what we were actually able to achieve with any stability I'd say 4.8

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GHz is very doable um thank you for checking out my little walkthrough on

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overclocking the bulldozer FX 8150 don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips

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