OC FX-8120 BIOS settings for a stable 4500 MHz

Greetings All,

I'm new to Overclock.net and have been reading the majority of the posts on OCing the AMD FX-8120 CPU.

It's been well over a decade since the last time I OCed and have some questions. I know they might have been answered in other posts but some of them are not that thorough or a little vague. Most have posted settings from CPU-Z but that's not 100% accurate in some settings, an example would be voltages.

So, I have successfully OCed my 8120 to 4100 MHz (x20.5 mult., Vcore 1.36), that's seems to be easy, but my issue is getting a stable 4300 or even 4500. It seems to be easy but my system seems to have stability issue at these frequencies. I have disables the necessary setting in the BIOS that to prevent the CPU to throttle down. My RAM is running at 1600 MHz!

I'm running y-cruncher and Prime95. If it passes y-cruncher, I then run Prime95. Usually in Prime, I get 2 cores that fail but the remaining seem to be stable.

I guess my question is how do I fine tune my system to run my goals. I'm not really looking to benchmark per se, but to get a stable overclock for 24/7. I'm looking for BIOS settings... Thanks all !!!

The highest temp. has only been 41c so I don't think cooling is an issue!

I just bought my equipment a couple of weeks ago and the components are listed as follows:

AMD FX-8120
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz 8 GB (2x4GB)
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1GB
OCZ Agility 3 120 GB SSD
Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 500GB HDD x2 in RAID 0
Corsair H80
Corsair TX650
Nexus 120 mm case fans x4
Antec gaming case

Cheers,

X
Edited by Xdj1 - 4/11/12 at 5:53pm

Hey,

First off, thanks for the reply!

My mobo is ver. 1.0...

Ok, so at 4100MHz, the bios is set at 1.4125v (+0.100). In HW Monitor, load CPU Vcore is 1.30V and VIN1 is at 1.49V.
The temp is 27C.

I did notice on the 5th or 6th test in Prime95 that core 8 failed while ever other core was running fine in Blend mode!.

What should be done...

Cmac,

I know all CPU's are not created equal, but most will OC over 4500MHz and be stable. I've had mine over that but it wasn't stable!

Did you have any other settings in the BIOS? Or was it just your Vcore, CPU ratio (Multiplier), and your bus speed?

Is there a rule of thumb for voltage: Too little, the system will not boot into Windows and too much will crash (BSOD) Windows?

Thanks,

@Cmac:

Thanks for the settings, I do have the RAM set manually since it was the only way to get it to boot past the BIOS screen above the default 1333 settings.

I'll check the rest of the settings later today since my kids got me up at 7 this morning to hunt for Easter eggs and I basically just went to bed!!! I was of course playing around with the system...

I'm pretty sure I have all the unnecessary settings disabled. I have noticed that the system will throttle down even though Cool and Quiet is disable!

Btw, I'm running the latest Beta BIOS version, F7n.

@2Advanced:

I have set my voltage in the BIOS a few times to 1.46 and 1.48 but wasn't sure if it was that save since I have only seen CPU-Z captures running 1.45 max on the internet.

Generally, do you use PC Health Status to view your voltages?

I think Cmac68 Mobo is version 1.1.

Sorry, I forgot... My RAM is in the correct slots and I ran Memtest86 to check it out. After a couple of hours of testing there were no errors reported!

Thanks...

@Cmac:

I tried your first set of settings and with the 1st voltage at (+.100v) 1.4125v, I got a BSOD. The 2nd voltage (+.075v), one step down, I received a post error, "System has experienced boot failures because of overclocking".

The second set of settings with the first voltage at (+.100v) 1.4125v, the system booted but displayed only around 3600 MHz. I rebooted but it froze at the Windows splash screen. I tried (+.125v) 1.4375 but it froze again!

I have just tried a 3rd voltage (+.150v) 1.4625v in the BIOS and it booted into Windows.

No load:



Time to test for stability!!!