Okay well, I will be brief: I need to get the most performance possible out of an AMD Phenom 9600. Quad-core sucks and it puts out a lot of heat, so I used AMD Downcore, a function built into my motherboard, to deactivate two cores and transform this Phenom into a dual-core processor. As a result of that, my heat fell drastically (to 26C idle) which means I have a ton of room to overclock. By the way that 26C is with it already overclocked from 2.3 to 2.6 GHz. The room temperature is 25C.

Some relevant information:


My cooling information isn't really relevant except that the temperatures mentioned above are correct.

I am totally new to overclocking, so I set it on auto-overclock in the BIOS to 15%, which raised me to the current level. I have options to do this all the way to 30%, however anything higher than 15% makes the computer freeze at the windows loading screen. I am not sure what I can do here, but I want to get my processor as fast as I can. I believe the multiplier is locked at 11.5x, since i tried increasing that in the BIOS manually and it doesn't actually increase it, so I will need an alternative way to do it. I am not quite sure what the auto-overclocking sets things to, so I would be willing to try whatever. I have a lot of money but at the moment I am waiting for the new Deneb 45nm AMDs to come out, so I am not willing to buy a new processor. Anything else, however, is pretty much fair game. My PSU can handle anything you want to throw at it.

What DOES auto-overclock do? I highly recommend against it, as it's something you don't ever want to be automatically set. Unfortunately, multiplier is locked on non-black editions, so you'll have to increase the bus. Slowly raise it until you find the highest frequency you can run stable at. Run stress tests to be sure. Keep your eyes on the temps like you are and you should be fine.

What DOES auto-overclock do?

It appears to set all the things for you. For instance it appears to have overclocked the ram, HT speed, and FSB.

I highly recommend against it, as it's something you don't ever want to be automatically set. Unfortunately, multiplier is locked on non-black editions, so you'll have to increase the bus. Slowly raise it until you find the highest frequency you can run stable at. Run stress tests to be sure. Keep your eyes on the temps like you are and you should be fine.

Well here is the deal: auto overclocked to where it is now runs perfectly stable even under stress, however when I disable auto overclocking and increase the FSB even 4 mhz alone, it won't boot even though, as you can see up there, the FSB overclocks to 225 fine.

I'm sure its doing other adjustments, such as voltage increase. If it works for you, go ahead and keep it there. You just won't have near as much control over every individual aspect.

i'm pretty sure auto overclock adjusts the ram frequencies etc so that all the frequencies have a shared multiple