I upgraded my motherbord and processor because my previous CPU (an AMD Athlon Phenom II X4 965 @4x3.4Ghz Black ed.) was not giving me the performance I need.
I am a musician and I need raw core power, so the 3.4Ghz was what is important to me. I was able to overclock it to 3.5ghz. Any higher and the system became a bit unstable. I tried overclocking it more, but was unable to. I decided to upgrade to the following components:
mainboard: MSI 970A-G43
cpu: AMD FX-9320E @8x 3.2Ghz
cooler: Zalman CNPS 2X
If I set everything on Auto (multiplier = 16, bus = 200) with AMD turbo enabled, it will run on 3.2 Ghz and turbo will allow the CPU to go upto 4Ghz.
The problem is that with music, the delay for reaching 4ghz is giving me trouble, so I need it to be 4ghz steady, so clocking it would be ideal.
Reading about overclocking this CPU tells me I should disable the AMD Turbo function, then find a stable setting, increase with baby steps, and if the system becomes unstable, increase the CPU voltage setting by one.
I determined I can run the system pretty stable using a multiplier of 18, with a bus speed of 204, reaching a core speed of 3.661 Mhz per core. While doing nothing, the system restarted once, so I figure this setting is not a stable setting and I'll need to increase the voltage. According to CPU-Z, the Core voltage is around 1.15~1.16V. In the bios this is set to Auto. The problem is that I cannot set the voltage core to 1.16V in the BIOS. I can set it to 1.10 and 1.21.
Both settings will cause windows to crash directly on boot. If I place vcore back to auto, I can get into windows no problems. Multiplier and bus speeds are still unaltered.
I'm new to overclocking, but I really need to clock this, or the purchase has been for nothing, and I doubt I can return the processor with coolingpaste etc attached to it.
I can give more details about what settings the bios allows me if needed. Any help on how to continue would be really helpful.
EDIT: My question: How can I increase (alter?) the voltage of the cpu and boot into windows?
EDIT2: Also, the bios comes with its own overclock wizard. If I run that, it'll find a setting of 3,425 ghz.
Zalman CNPS 2X
is a mini-ATX cooler you are not going to get 30% overclock with it.