Overclocking an AMD Phenom II Quad Core 965 BE ....

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Hi all,

Being new to all this overclocking mallarky, I have a question for anyone in the know....
After a bit of Googling, I have taken the plunge and overclocked my year old AMD Phenom II Quad Core 965 Black Edition processor which I have mounted in my Asus M4A785TD-M EVO motherboard. The CPU is cooled with the excellent Zalman CNPS9900-LED Dual Flower cooler which is installed with thermal paste.
After a year of use, I have found my PC no longer acts as required with all the latest games and I want it to be ready for the upcoming Skyrim which is basically going to take over my entire life ;)
I have followed instructions and am currently running my CPU at 3.9GHz at 1.5v exactly and according to AMD Overdrive, the core temps are 53.38 degrees max when stressing the PC out using Prime95.
What I'm wondering is, should I go for the golden 4GHz and if this crashes my PC when on full load (which it will do if the CPU is not getting enough voltage, yes?), up the voltage a tad more? Is that how it works?
 
Hi all,

Being new to all this overclocking mallarky, I have a question for anyone in the know....
After a bit of Googling, I have taken the plunge and overclocked my year old AMD Phenom II Quad Core 965 Black Edition processor which I have mounted in my Asus M4A785TD-M EVO motherboard. The CPU is cooled with the excellent Zalman CNPS9900-LED Dual Flower cooler which is installed with thermal paste.
After a year of use, I have found my PC no longer acts as required with all the latest games and I want it to be ready for the upcoming Skyrim which is basically going to take over my entire life ;)
I have followed instructions and am currently running my CPU at 3.9GHz at 1.5v exactly and according to AMD Overdrive, the core temps are 53.38 degrees max when stressing the PC out using Prime95.
What I'm wondering is, should I go for the golden 4GHz and if this crashes my PC when on full load (which it will do if the CPU is not getting enough voltage, yes?), up the voltage a tad more? Is that how it works?

I had a 965 BE in my previous set-up and ran it at 4.0Ghz using 1.5v without any issues.

As long as you can keep the temps about what you have now it should be fine, i doubt you will actually need anymore volts to reach 4.0.

normally everyday temps are nowhere near as much as what they would be when running prime95, mine where in the mid 40's when gaming.
 
OK. Can you tell me something though? When I change the settings and start Prime95, and the PC reboots immediately, does that indicate that the CPU isn't getting enough voltage?
 
I Have a 955 Black and run it on a Gigabyte M78LMT-US2H.

I ran AMD Overdrive and it achieved 4.3Ghz before Overdive stopped. And this was using the default (Auto) settings for voltage and RAM timings. I managed to tweak it a little further to 4.35 before it started hitting BSODs

I have backed it off to 4.1Ghz (20.5 x 200) and it is sitting quite happily crunching BOINC projects 24/7.....

I have also got a 1055T hex core running at a very stable 3.5Ghz (14 x 250) with the same Gigabyte motherboard.

I tried the 955BE on an Asus motherboard that Asus "claim" to be compatible with Black Edition and Hex cores and the only way it would run without throttling, even at stock speeds, was to disable one core.

You should be able to hit the golden 4Ghz barrier.... bite the bullet and see how far AMD overdrive will push it....
 
dont go over 1.5v and the max cpu temp rated is 62c, but its not safe there as its on its limit so dont let temps go beyond 55c MAX
 
I am currently running a 965 at 4.0 on a low 1.375V on an MSI 790fx-gd70. I could get 1.38 on stock auto voltage but it took a little more to make 4.0 stable my main stability issue was due to ram speed. I am running 1600 ram but had to back off to 1333 and slightly looser timings to make the system stable (especially as I am running 8GB over 4 slots). However every benchmark I have seen has shown very minimal differences for gaming with 1333 vs 1600 so I am happy enough as it means I can put 4.0 Gh on my sig.

As said above these chips do not like high temps. I find mine becomes unstable (at 4 Ghz) at high 50s which is another reason to keep the voltage as low as possible. Now I am on water my temps are much better which helps the overclock even more.
 
i dont know what the voltage for the DIMM slots is called on your board/chipset, but on sandy bridge i know for sure you can increase the QPI/VTT voltage which provides more power to the RAM making it stable, so you can increase that and lower Vcore
 

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