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Old November 26th 11, 06:21 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd
Paul
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Default Using the AMD Overdrive utility

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 25/11/2011 12:08 AM, Paul wrote:
You don't need anything too fancy.

In your case, you're "Driving a Cadillac". You have multiplier
control, so issues about accidentally overclocked RAM are a non-issue.
You'll need to use some VCore, to get to use more steps.


Yeah, I know, I'm really pleased that this particular processor came
down in price so nicely.

Basically, the process as I see it, is to "draw a speed versus VCore
voltage graph".
Raise the CPU speed in tiny steps. Boot to your OS (the tiny steps are
important to not outright crashing the OS immediately).

I run Prime95 for testing. I gradually inch up the speed, until I
see an error in Prime95 in five to ten minutes. Then, I have a "data
point".
I bump the voltage a bit, and retest. If it's stable, move up in
frequency
again, until it becomes slightly unstable and throws another Prime95
error.


Yup, I'm using the Stability Test inside AOD, it looks like it will
actually stop the test once it finds an error and report it. And the
error will show up within 10 minutes, so no need to run an 1 hour or
longer test.

Unfortunately, if the AOD stability test finds an error, it's already
too late, and the operating system is just moments away from instability
itself, so it will need to be rebooted. So after the reboot, I just
increase the voltage another 0.05V and usually it's stable. I've now
gotten it stable at 3.6GHz base/3.7GHz turbo. Overclocking it through
the AOD has the advantage that you can leave the BIOS settings at
completely stock, and the overclocking only takes place once the AOD
service starts up in Windows, and you can just disable the service or
just load the default settings in the service to get back to original.

I might try to overclock the Turbo speed next.

Also it looks like it's not necessary to shut off Cool'N'Quiet or C1E
states with the AOD utility, as was suggested by one of the sites I
looked up. So you can still keep a nice and cool system while idle, but
you have a higher maximum.

Yousuf Khan


Well, I can't say what will happen in your case, but when you use
things like CNQ, they use ACPI schema, and the multipler values
for idle and full blast, are stored in there. The question then is,
depending on how you're overclocking, does CNQ do the right thing,
or does it use the defaults for the processor ?

For example, RMClock allows you to control the response of your
processor. I think it adds an extra entry to the ACPI information,
so it can control what happens. In the Power control panel, you'll
likely see it set to something RMClock related, after RMClock is
installed.

http://cpu.rightmark.org/download.shtml

I find it's got too many controls for my liking.

http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/9...8210631yy3.jpg

More fun with RMClock, here. Demo of "graphs" it draws.
That is handy for detecting CPU throttling.

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/cpu/in...res-core2.html

One reason I used that tool, is it includes an "Idle Loop" task.
Back when I was using Win2K, I bought a one year subscription to
Kaspersky. Several months after installing it, I happened to make
a power measurement on my CPU (ammeter on +12V), and noticed the
consumption was too high. What was happening, is Kaspersky eliminated
the idle loop in Win2K, as some sort of protection. It meant, when the
system was idle, it wasn't using HALT instructions (an interrupt, like the
clock tick interrupt, brings the CPU out of HALT). So the processor would
wait for the next scheduled task, while sitting in some kind of loop
instead.

Ticking the box in RMClock for that, causes RMClock to run it's own
low priority task (one per core). When the system is idle, that task
runs, and the RightMark designers put HALT in their version. Basically,
it allowed overriding what the Kaspersky designers did. And it returned
my idle performance, back to where it belonged. Otherwise, I might
have not had occasion to use it that much.

I think I had some other tool, simpler in design, to fool around
with the equivalent of P-States, multipliers and VCore. And at least
that tool, I could figure out what I wanted from it. First link is
screenshot of what feature I think I was using. Second is the web site.

http://i1-win.softpedia-static.com/s...talCPUID_3.png

http://crystalmark.info/download/

You can scan software like that on virustotal.com if you want,
before using it. A clean reading doesn't mean anything, if
some new malware is added to a download, but it's better than
nothing. To save on uploading times, you can computer an
MD5 checksum instead, and use the "search" function on virustotal.com,
to search for previous AV scans on the file.

Have fun,
Paul