Overclocking The AMD AM1 Athlon & Sempron APUs

[AJSB]

If one was using a dedicated gpu can the onboard gpu be disabled and allow for a higher overclock?

Dunno about more OC, but IIRC, ASUS Mobos let you disable onboard graphics.

[AJSB]

If you have a AM1 ASUS MoBo check your BIOS version, ASUS have new BIOS to increase system stability....might help OC ?

After all, they say that their AM1 Mobos support 1866MHz RAM speed (but you might need true 1866MHz RAM to reach that speed)...

[vcsg01]

If one was using a dedicated gpu can the onboard gpu be disabled and allow for a higher overclock?

[molecule-eye]

Considering the minimal speed bump and the short pipelines of the architecture, I'd say the performance improvement was pretty good. But, you should've been able to get higher than that. You'd get a lot higher if you lowered RAM frequency and increased voltage.

Good idea. Buy a 25W TDP chip and OC it so that it's competing with 65W chips. Ha!

[[Knuckles]]

The issue is that for overclocking you need components which still have some untapped potential on them. When you do a board for as-cheap-as-possible, the chosen components will be the cheapest and lowest quality you can get away with, so when you start OC'ing you hit their limits really fast.

[grndzro]

It could be that the IMC is not capable of being overclocked.
You could try underclocking the IMC and then OC if you have access to the IMC multiplier.

It isn't An FX/Black/unlocked CPU so you have to ramp up the bus to OC. That changes the IMC frequency accordingly.

[Luke]

DDR 3 is touchy about both voltage and timings

I tried lowering the RAM frequency to DDR3-1333MHz as well as bumping up the voltage (up to 3 steps) to no avail. I did get it to boot a few times at 107~110MHz but would reset itself usually a few seconds after getting back into the UEFI setup.

I've actually played with the same CPU (a Phenom II x4) in both a DDR2 and a DDR3 motherboard. The older 785 chipset would allow CPU give power management and a higher multiplier to be used together, but you could run the base clock up to about 236-238 MHZ to overclock from 3.2GHZ to almost 3.8 GHZ, in the process overclocking DDR2-800 to almost 1000MHZ on the same voltage and timings with no issues.

Put the same chip in the FX 990fx board, and the base clock could not go over about 110 MHZ if even that without instability. On that board the unlocked multiplier could be used w/o losing power management, so this was no big deal. Same RAM with that chip and my FX8120 CPU, it will go as high as DDR3-1833-but NOT without selecting a complete DDR3-profile with not only the corrrect voltage but the correct timings for this! It is DDR3-1600, and will error out even at stock clocks if a DDR3-1333 "profile" of voltage/timings is used at 1600 MHZ.

Therefore, it seems to me that all of these boards would require first selecting a higher DDR "profile" (multiplier/timings/voltage), then manually reducing the RAM multiplier before a base clock overclock could be used effectively. This would bring the RAM back to the high profile's starting point and bring up the CPU clock. Haven't tried this as the unlocked CPU multipliers on all my CPU chips allow setting the CPU and RAM frequencies one at a time, a better approach when available it seems to me.

[dungeon]

I installed fglrx in Lubuntu . and compared it with radeon in Debian with hyperz enabled . At 1920x1080 resolution In Openarena 0.8.5 i have 79.4% performance of fglrx and in Openarena 0.8.8 that is 86.3% - pretty good results .

Ha without Hyperz enabled in both cases we are at ~56% level .

[dungeon]

Michael you mentioned fglrx tests coming... so please turn on HyperZ for radeon if you test on 1920x1080 resoultion, it makes a difference in that case .

But if you test on lower like 1024x768 dont worry, there is not as much difference there .

I installed fglrx in Lubuntu . and compared it with radeon in Debian with hyperz enabled . At 1920x1080 resolution In Openarena 0.8.5 i have 79.4% performance of fglrx and in Openarena 0.8.8 that is 86.3% - pretty good results .

[mczak]

I cant find how many power phases that motherboard has.
It is kind of silly not to say how many phases but include overclocking.

It might be a factor in overclocking.

I highly doubt that given the quite low wattage.
Pretty sure it's just the reference clock which limits because everything depends on it. Wondering what the "true" clock limit of the cpu cores actually is - but with (almost no) multiplier adjustments on locked chips, no unlocked ones and just minimal reference clock adjustments there's no way to find out...
I think gpu overclocking would be quite interesting too, after all the clock is only 600Mhz for the fastest part, whereas discrete graphic chips using near 100% identical logic easily reach 1000Mhz (on the same or very similar 28nm process too). But looks like that's not possible neither :-(.