Processors

[Michael_Wilborne]

Hello. I am running on an AMD FX 8350 Eight-Core Processor manually Clocked at 4.5 GHz. I am wanting to push more performance out of my processor. How could I do that and if there are drivers to install that would help me I will go ahead and install though. Thank you.

[hitbm47 · Accepted solution]

Hey @Michael_Wilborne ,

Unfortunately, the one I have is a bad bin and I could only push it to 4.5Ghz. But,

- Firstly, you will need at least a respectable 120mm AIO Liquid cooler on it (the FX 8350's actually has quite impressive thermals, mine only thermal throttled at 80C, but the VRMs could not keep up),

- Secondly, you need a 220W CPU supported motherboard with a FAN blowing directly on the heat-sink which is mounted on-top of the VRMs,

- Max recommended CPU voltage is between 1.5V-1.55V,

- Also use at least 1866Mhz RAM,

- The Front-side BUS method did not help me as much as some people claimed if you are not going above 1866Mhz RAM.

Kind regards

[hitbm47 · Accepted solution]

Hey @Michael_Wilborne ,

Unfortunately, the one I have is a bad bin and I could only push it to 4.5Ghz. But,

- Firstly, you will need at least a respectable 120mm AIO Liquid cooler on it (the FX 8350's actually has quite impressive thermals, mine only thermal throttled at 80C, but the VRMs could not keep up),

- Secondly, you need a 220W CPU supported motherboard with a FAN blowing directly on the heat-sink which is mounted on-top of the VRMs,

- Max recommended CPU voltage is between 1.5V-1.55V,

- Also use at least 1866Mhz RAM,

- The Front-side BUS method did not help me as much as some people claimed if you are not going above 1866Mhz RAM.

Kind regards

[Michael_Wilborne]

Thank you for the info!

[elstaci]

@hitbm47 

I am surprised your FX8350 at 80c started to throttle at that temperature when the Maximum Operating Temperature when it starts to throttle is 61c.

When I was using my FX8350, no overclocking,  when it reached close to 80c it would  shut down my computer from being overheated.  This was verified 2 or 3 times when I was trying to find out what was wrong with my old air CPU Cooler.

The FX8350 has a high TDP rating of 125 watts but a very low Throttling limit of 61c.

[hitbm47]

Hey @elstaci 

Yes in that regards I was lucky, although I know AMD's website states 61C as the thermal limit. Most users seemed to have a thermal limit range somewhere between 70C-80C which you can also find in this overclocking guide:

I think AMD might have been referring to another temperature sensor directly on the cores, or it might be that AM3+ motherboards reported different thermal sensors, I have a MSI 990FXA Gaming. But, with the stock wraith cooler it would keep the temperatures below 65C under full load with 45C-54C during gaming, whereas I could do a 4.4Ghz overclock for 76C under load without thermal throttling and still using the stock cooler. Unfortunately, upgrading to an AIO did not help me because the VRMs would thermal throttle before the CPU (where the CPU would now be less than 65C at 4.5Ghz).

In contradiction, the overclock barely helped because AMDs DX9/DX10/DX11 driver, etc. is a hit and miss between different games and varies between different CPU architectures even when say an FX8350 and an i7 870 is very similar in performance. Which is why I recommended a Nvidia GPU to the OP, since it is more consistent and dynamic in the way it uses one's CPU, which is important for the low IPC of our older eight threaded CPUs.

[jamesc359]

Without taking extreme steps you're not going to squeeze much more performance out of an old FX-8350. My advise is to either upgrade to a Ryzen or learn to be happy with what you've got. When paired with a reasonable GPU the FX-8350 is still quite capable in the majority of newer games if your expectations are reasonable and most intensive work loads (e.g. video encoding) can be scheduled to run over night.

[hitbm47 · Accepted solution]

I agree with @jamesc359 in the sense that pushing extra funds into overclocking the FX 8350 is not worth it. From my experience, an overclock on the FX 8350 only makes a difference in games that are already optimized well for the FX 8350; for example, the Witcher 3, Battlefield 3-5, Call of Duty and such games will improve in performance.

Games that are already performing bad at stock, will continue to perform bad even when overclocked, simply because they are bottlenecking because of not taking advantage of the architecture. For example, Far Cry 5 will continue to run poorly.

Furthermore, when testing Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City my FPS didn't budge 1FPS after overclocking to 4.5Ghz with even the FSB method. Subsequently, simply switching to my older i7 870 gave me a 20FPS boost CPU-side in RE, the same counts for Kane & Lynch 2.

I am no Nvidia fan-boy, but my suggestion for you is to use a Nvidia GPU on your FX 8350 for DX9/DX10/DX11/OpenGL titles.