Overclocking Bulldozer.
 

Hey, I've been messing around with my AMD FX-8150 for a while now and I wanna know what the best way to overclock it is. At the moment it has a frequency of 250MHz and the multiplier is x16 (4GHz), voltage is about 1.3V, is this a good setup? It used to have a frequency of 230MHz with a multiplier of x17.5 for the same speed, but I don't know what's best increase, multiplier or frequency? Any idea what the best setup for it is? And if you own this CPU, what are your speeds etc?

P.S, Using the stock cooler, So I'm very reluctant to go over 4.2 GHz. (Until I eventually buy an aftermarket one obvously :D )

I'm not sure if it really matters whether you do a frequency overclock, or a multi overclock, or a bit of both, so long as its stable. I think the easiest way to overclock those chips is to just do the multiplier, that way the memory and NB/HT stays constant and you can dial in the cpu's speed without the other components affecting stability too much. I had the fx-6100 and just overclocked the multiplier as far as it would go. You can then tweak the Northbridge and hypertransport if you want to get a bit mre performance. I think on air so long as you are below 1.45V and not over 50 degrees you are safe. There should be a guide on OC'ing the 8150 though, just google it up.

I've got mine at 4.8 but only do so under Noctua or Water I do not ever overclock on stock heatsinks but if you wanna know how to obtain the higher clocks I will give you the common setting a few of us have our 8150's at

Thanks for sharing. :).. The maximum temp I can get it to is 62 degrees celsuis with Prime95, I've been running it for a while now and nothing seems to be unstable, all threads running at 100%. Is the 62 a bit too much? I've heard processors can run up to about 90. :S Should I underclock it a bit for now, until a get a new cooler?

where are you located I might have a spare AM3 cooler kicking around?

You're very generous for offering but I couldn't accept, I'd just feel bad and I'll be able to afford one soon anyway. And I'm located in a little village in Wales (Next to England in the UK), while you're in Canada so it's pretty far away xD. Thanks anyway though. :)

Check out this guide, I just oc'd my fx-6100 to 4.43ghz stable at 1.45v and I stay under 60 with linx, under 50 with coretemp and under 50 with hwmonitor. But my mobo is a giga ud3 and with that utility it shows above 50 and under 60.

I bought this off dandelioneater, and he also gave me this guide, you can use it and it works!

Bulldozer Overclocking Guide (Performance Scaling Charts, max OCs)LN2 Results coming!


Good luck

I just did a build for someone with a 8150, we OCed it to 5Ghz on a H100. Just wanted to share one thing I have not seen listed with these(and this thread seems to be the most relevant under a search). I was having issues with keeping temps down and hit a wall around 4.8Ghz. It just was getting too hot and unstable, even with a H100 in a push pull.

1) the Asus Sabertooth 990FX does a slight overclock on this board through FSB. Its just enough to screw up a set of 1600Mhz ram. If I reduced the FSB by 1-2mhz it was enough to not crash this particular kit. But it was still running slightly over 800mhz.

2) Asus has a option in the bios, CPU load line Calibration. When we first started OCing this was left to auto... Bad idea... I dont know what auto does exacly under the newest bios, but it will run your cpu voltage higher then what you set it to. I think the one time I set the cpu Voltage around 1.48v-ish and cpuz was reporting 1.53v under load and we were running 15-20C higher then when we turned this off. in the end I still used this option but it was manually set to high and it helped with voltage drops when under load.

Nothing fantastic or ground breaking, but thought I would share this since it effected temps and OC. The cpu is running 5Ghz and runs peak 53C under full load. 4.8 was low-mid 40's under full load.