Amd phenom ii 955 be c3 overclock

Been sharing some results on here with my Athlon X4 ii 630 which i managed to get stable at 3.5Ghz at 1.5v, but lo that chip is now on ebay, not cause its broke, it works great!
Just got tempted by another, the L3 cache and the attractive price of £92 just made me want the 955 BE!

Anyway after just one night of fiddling, here are my results with the new processor, I am happy at this, have run intel burn test 15 times on high setting, it seems solid.

FSB : 250
CPU : 4Ghz (4000mMhz) @ 1.5v 126W
HT : 2000Mhz
NB : 2500Mhz @ 1.325V probably would stabilise lower
DRAM : 833Mhz 10GB DDR2 at 6-5-5-15-20 2T

Here are the stat sheets:

Seems to be able to keep about with a i7 2600k
Is there a noticeable price difference in the two?

Hi, the price of the AMD in the UK is £92.

The Intel I5 2600K ia around £164 for one unlocked to 3.4Ghz, there seems to be some extreme versions around that are claiming to be unlocked to 5.3Ghz which sounds like hyper threading to me?? and these are around £340 so there is quite a difference overall in price terms.

Hi, despite running Intel burn test without fault, i seemed to be getting random crashes, internet explorer and then media centre, changed the HT link to 2250Mhz and all is stable once more, running everything great.

GFLOP comparison:

AMD Athlon II X4 630 2.8 Ghz (3.5 Ghz) : 39 Gflops
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2 Ghz (4.0 Ghz) : 49 Gflops

When running FSX I have about 15-20 more frames with the new processor, but its more that it runs consistently higher frame rates, the Athlon was more prone to drop to low frame rates than this one is when complexity arose in the scenery.

Overall its been a worthwhile switch i feel, my GTX 470 appreciates the new processor i feel.

Using the same cooler however this 955 seems to run 4-5 C hotter than the Athlon, but i guess the chip and thermal compound havent settled yet, I use MX-2 thermal compound and when i installed this new cooler on the Athlon it seemed to drop 4-5 C on idle and load after a few days.

Cheers guys.

Nomad8459 said:

Hi, the price of the AMD in the UK is £92.

The Intel I5 2600K ia around £164 for one unlocked to 3.4Ghz, there seems to be some extreme versions around that are claiming to be unlocked to 5.3Ghz which sounds like hyper threading to me?? and these are around £340 so there is quite a difference overall in price terms.

Click to expand...

Just to clear a couple of things up on this , the i5 is actually the 2500k which you are correct on price , these can be clocked to over 5ghz if you get a goodun.

The i7 is the 2600k , these are £240 ish and again can be clocked to over 5ghz if you get a goodun.

I have not heard of any extreme versions.

Best of luck with your overclocking.

Unfortunaly I don't have any experience of AMD chips so can't help.

Regards

Paul.

Hi, thanks for the info, am no expert on Intel as I have never bothered with them, i just like to back the underdog i think.

It sounds like the new Intels are the best of the best, especially the i7's.

I just had a quick look around ebay for the above figures, the extreme versions are listed on Ebay.

My idle temps have started to drop now, 42 C idle, down from 48 C, I did reapply thermal paste and really tighten up the fan however also.

the Arctic Cooling Pro 7 that i have has two seperate holes for mounting the attachments for the mounting bracket on the motherboard, I have changed to using both the inner ones now, it was a pig to get on but the fit is much tighter and I assume that better contact is being made.

The random crashes returned, and it seems the source was EPU, an asus program for power management, this was available when i first got this PC as a download for Win7 but it now states that it only supports Vista, I guess there was some conflict between it and the Windows 7 inbuilt power management which is basically doing the same job, anyway back to the origional overclock now with HT at 2000 and she runs intel burn test 20 times on very high settings without issue, my maximum temps while doing that were 61 C, a little high but that was before this recent temp drop from refitting and reapplying the paste.

I honestly have equal respect for intel and AMD both, I own both and I'm happy with both. At any rate how do you expect to offer anyone fair comparisons or advice if you don't at least give them both a chance.
About the only thing I've given up on with Intel is the fact that I now accept that they will never make a functional GPU.

I had a quick look at these "extreme" versions on ebay lol , Not real , there is not an extreme version. The sellers are just blagging it.

Go to any reputable site and you will not find them as they do not exist.

I had my 2600k up to 5.1ghz stable and Jeepman off here had his upto 5.5ghz iirc , I think nearly all will hit 4.8ghz with a decent mobo.

Sorry for the off topic , just thought its fair to warn people about these fake products on ebay.

No worries at all, as i say am no expert on Intel. Does seem they are top dog again however....

Back on topic ....

After some more fiddling this CPU AMD 955 X4 phenom is now fully stable at :

FSB: 248
CPU: 4.2Ghz 4200mhz @1.5125V
NB: 2480Mhz @1.325V
HT: 1980Mhz @ stock
Dram: 827 6-5-5-15-20-2t

Tried a few alternatives like dropping the FSB down and raising the multiplier but the CPU seems relatively happy whatever i do to it!

Load temps are now 54C with idle at 47C or 45C when cool and quiet enabled.

Someone mentioned on a site that having a high NB is beneficial but i can say that is only if your memory needs it, rasing the NB to 2660 and HT to 2180 while dropping the ram back to 800Mhz and tightening the timing so the cas was 5 rather than 6, maintaining the 4.2Ghz CPU yielded just the same results, it required a raising of the CPU-NB voltage to 1.35V and so went back down to this.

Question is do i see what more i can get out of this chip, temperatures are ok, I am wondering if it would like 4.32 at the same voltage??

The payoff here is if it doesnt require voltage then no real heat is added.

The CPU is at 127W when fully loaded.

It just doesnt seem phased at the moment with the 4.2Ghz.

In the real world, a good graphics card yields you better things, especially if you can overclock that as well, certainly in terms of frame rates, a fast hard disk helps you along also.

My frame rates in FSX with this set up are more than doubled, was getting like 12fps on the Athlon when on the ground, now achieving more like 35fps.

Its hard to say how much quicker this CPU is over its stock and therefore how valuable the overclock was because i wasnt patient enough to test it at stock, but 3.2Ghz to 4.2Ghz sounds pretty good, even if it is outshone considerably by the I7, having seem some stats on that, it really does seem to offer a very swift experience.

Cheers

Nomad8459 said:

even if it is outshone considerably by the I7, having seem some stats on that, it really does seem to offer a very swift experience.

Cheers

Click to expand...

I'm not really saying the I7 is in some league of it's own. I was just using it as intel's best current example of an overclock chip, and stacking what you had against it. Seems damn close to be honest.

Amd phenom ii x4 955 stable at 4.0ghz

Ran into more issues with my overclock, mainly because i decided to stress test it.

It seemed to pass everything but then went a bit haywire when i tried Intel Burn Test on a very high (4096) setting, it then had a period of not being stable above 4Ghz at all.

So i went back to the start and retried lots of different settings.

This setting has passed IBT on both standard and high settings for 10 runs at about 48.6 Gflops.

It passes PIMaxx also with a rating of 567.

its just finished a four hour stress test of Prime 95 and so I am thinking its pretty much OK.

FSB : 250 (x16)
CPU : 4.0Ghz or 4000Mhz at 1.50V
NB : 2500Mhz at 1.3125V (x10)
HT : 2000Mhz (x8)
DRAM : 417Mhz or 834Mhz DDR2 12GB RAM at 6-5-5-18-20-2T

As can be seen the core temps were getting quite up there at 59C.

I have ordered a new cooler as i believe that this CPU does have 4.2Ghz in it, it booted and ran several stress tests at this speed and I think the temps be holding it back, Voltage is 1.5V at the moment so there is some small room to adjust higher.

lol it's starting to sound most like this old 6850 chip I have.
Got it to take a good clock once and should have left it alone, never got it higher than 3.8 again after I messed with it.

Well, new cooler has arrived and I have shaved around 3C off the max temps when loading 100% with IBT or Prime95, I thought it might give me the leeway to get my 4.2Ghz which was a high target to set myelf.

I have gone from an Arctic Cooling Freezer pro 7 rev 2 to a Hyper 212 from Coolermaster, there is an improvement and i guess it hasnt settled yet, even using the mx-2 thermal compound with the Freezer pro, it dropped by about 4-5C after a short bed in period of a few days, this compound is not supposed to need curing but go figure.

It will boot and run at 4.143Ghz all day, will pass Maxx PI, Aida 64 stress test, everything apart from IBT, when running IBT it blue screens with secondary processor clock interupt error.

So max clock for me is 4.022Ghz which is Kinda OK.

I think this is the limit for this processor, tried max voltage i would go to at 1.55 and it still crashed after 3 runs of IBT.

The extra Mhz was giving me an extra 1 gflop in IBT before it crashed so i guess not worth worrying about.

The new cooler will allow me to rest assured that even at very high stress my Temps should stay at 55C core temp.

I must add, that i am still using the cool and quiet feature as I like it.

As long as the multi doesnt go past 18X, then C and Q will still work, I think maybe that is holding the clock back also but one of my targets was to be able to keep this on and still achieve a high clock.

I mean without it, i could easilly set 20X multi and get my 4.2Ghz, maybe get it stable too but hey ho for 1 Gflop??

Cheeers Guys

Stick to 4GHz and get the bus speed and L3 cache to the highest speed you can.

Hi, for some reason i cannot get the NB speed above the 2440, I dont know if its is my RAM that is holding it back, if I try say 2664 then it will boot but BSOD with system service exception error. maybe the CPU speed is too high to support such a high NB speed.

At 4.143Ghz, the system boots and plays FSX and runs all benchmarks but was playing Assassins Creed and it crashed to desktop, not sure if it was the GPU though.

At 4.022Ghz, its IBT stable after 15 runs on a very high setting at 1.5125V, tried upping to 1.55 to get the 4.143 stable but no joy.

Read somewhere that the NB needs to be higher to maintain the higher CPU speed but i get that System service exception, even with the CPU lower than 4Ghz, havnt tried going down to 3.8Ghz and 2664 on the NB but also read that to get the high NB then the CPU needs to be around 3.8GHz?

Not sure, anyway system gives best benchmarks obviously wth 4.143, but they are about 5% higher only, hoping that this IBT stable frequency will be stable for everything.

Well, been running the 4.022Ghz for a few weeks now and have had no issues except a memory management bsod, which i assume was memory timings, i altered the timings from 6-5-5-15-20 which is what auto was giving me to 6-6-6-18-24 which is the rated timing for my current ram, all is very stable.

All games working well, can play for hours without any issues.

Max core temps while gaming are 51C with idle at 31C.

Wierdly though CPU temp is reporting as 47C idle and 57C loaded.

big difference between the two readings but i understand that core temps are more important.

My GTX470 after hours of gaming is max 69C which i understand is pretty cool, I have the fans on the gigabyte card set to a personal profile where the fan speed curve has a higher gradient, this coupled with a 120mm side fan blowing air right at the card helps to keep this temp down.

My RAM is running at 813Mhz with 10gb installed, a 4gb and 3 2gb modules, strangely this works despite everything i read about memory issues and matching the ram etc.

Anyways have decided to get some OCZ reaper ram, 8gb rated at 1066mhz 5-5-5-18

Gonna try to get the ram either at 1066 or at 850mhz running 4-4-4-12 just to boost the system and to make doubly sure that ram is stable long term.

Seems it could well be the HTT speed that is holding me back now, any higher than 244 and Intel Burn Test on very high settings says its unstable.

So with the new RAM, best figures keeping Cool and Quiet on are:

HTT : 244Mhz
CPU : 4.022 Ghz at 1.525V (16.5x)
DRAM : 975mhz @ 2.2V 5-5-5-15-24- 2t
NB : 2440Mhz
HT : 2193Mhz

This is with cool and quiet enabled as i say, I think the NB maybe could go higher without cool and quiet as if i raise the multiplier it gives a system service exception bsod, which to me suggests that either it is due to my CPU mutli being near stock and so the NB needs to be stock (10x) or its due to cool and quiet not allowing the multi higher than stock for the NB. Or its the issue as mentioned earlier where 3.8Ghz is the good setting for a high NB as well.

Just not too sure, I am pretty certain that its HTT holding it from stability though cause at 250Mhz and lowering the multi to 16 to give 4ghz, a frequency that I know to be stable, IBT gives instability and its definitely not RAM cause that still only gives 1000mhz on the RAM which is rated at 1066Mhz?

Any ideas, thoughts or opinions most welcome, I would like to get my NB higher, I think I am stuck on the RAM though at 975Mhz as getting any higher would require the higher HTT speed.

Well, this will be the final post on this subject as i have reached the limits of my overclocking!!

Several weeks of trial and error and a RAM upgrade later and i know this much:

CPU max is 4.02 Ghz for IBT (maximum test) stability

NB max is 2440, any higher and i get BSOD, could be because all four slots are populated.

My board WILL run 8GB DDR2 1066Mhz at the right frequency.

This is the final config:

HTT: 268 Mhz
CPU: 4021Mhz or 4.02Ghz at 1.525V (x15)
NB: 2412Mhz (x9) at 1.325V
HT: 2144Mhz (x7)
DRAM: 536Mhz (1072Mhz) DDR2 8GB 12:6 ratio

IBT maximum stress test stable.

Core temps idle: 28C
Core temps IBT max load: 62C
Core temps gaming max: 53C
CPU temp idle: 44C
CPU temp IBT max load: 60C
CPU temp gaming max: 51C