$300 Budget AMD rig - Page 4

I finished the build today, here are the results!

Went ahead and bought a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo Cooler since I knew I'd be OCing. The thing is massive, almost as big as the mobo itself!



Check out the clearance between the CPU cooler and Ram sticks!



Mounting the components into the case. This case is great, although it is cavernous for an mATX mobo! Also, the case panel cleared the CPU cooler by about a half inch.



Finished!



Now the fun part! I got a stable OC to 4.5ghz at 1.368v / x45 multiplier, and noticed when I was experimenting that anything over 1.4v would auto throttle even with Turbo Core disabled.





Here's a breakdown of the final cost:

CPU + Mobo Combo: AMD A10 5800k 3.8ghz, ASRock FM2A75 - DGS - $175
G.Skill DDR3 2133mhz 2x4GB Ripjaws - $35
Case: Rosewill Redbone U3 - $40
PSU: ThermalTake SmartPower 430w PSU - $18 after MIR
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 90gb SATA-III SSD - $60
CPU Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo - $35
GPU - Asus HD6670 1gb gddr5 - Already owned

Total - $363
Edited by storox - 11/8/12 at 2:28pm

Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention! In my ignorance I thought that OCing and Temperatures were all about the CPU cooler. As soon as I read your comment I put everything back to stock for safetys' sake and then dove into researching VRMs and MOSFETs and Chokes and every other piece of information I could get my eyes on concerning motherboards and overclocking.

As it stands now, I have turned my CPU cooler 90 degrees counterclockwise so as to vent the cooler out the back of the case (in effect a push/pull CPU cooler, since the rear case fan is lined up with the back end of the CPU heasink and about 3" away. I utilized the 80mm fan from the stock and mounted it directly over the VRM area of the motherboard to dissipate the heat.



This has led me to a few questions:

1- If I were to put aftermarket heatsinks on the VRMs, do they need to go on the MOSFETs only? or do I need to put them on the tiny modules in between the chokes?
2- Will doing this allow some room for overclocking or do I need to just learn from my mistake of thinking that OCing was all about the CPU cooler and bite the bullet until I can afford a new MoBo (ASRock FM2A85X Extreme 6)
If I simply shouldn't OC this motherboard at all, is it necessary to install heatsinks on the VRM area since they didn't come with any coolers at all? Will the fan I've placed over the entire area be sufficient for cooling?

Lastly, thanks to OCN and their Mods for putting out so much information for newbs like me to learn how to correctly go about it!

I wish I could tell you from experience, but I haven't ran the computer without the 6670 installed as to be able to contrast running it only with the iGPU. If I get some extra time I might try to run some benchmark tests with and without the 6670 to be able to find out the info you want to know, but we'll see.