 Alright guys, so stock CPU performance of the AMD FX8150 bulldozer CPU has been examined already at this time. Now we are going to have a look at how high we can overclock one of these chips and then what kind of performance we can squeeze out of it. So for cooling I'm going to be using a Corsair H100, you can't really see what's lit up, there you go, in the highest performance profile. Okay, so that's installed on the AMD 80150. I've got my MSI 990FX8 GD80 motherboard here. The reason I chose this one over the Corsair 5 was due to the fact that I really like the way the BIOS is laid out and I'm actually going to do a video about ClickBIOS 2, which is what they're calling this particular layout in an upcoming video. Whoops, that's not what I meant to do. It's pretty cool though actually, just the way that you navigate around is much, much faster than other EFI BIOS implementations and it's also much faster than the old way of doing things which was the traditional BIOS. So I'm very, very impressed so far. You can either use the mouse or the keyboard, although I think keyboard is a little bit faster but yeah, very, very cool. So stay tuned guys, remember overclocking on the FX series chips, all of them is quite easy. Basically the only settings that we're really going to be looking at, I've turned off OC Genie, I've turned off all of that automated stuff but we're pretty much going to be looking at the CPU ratio right here, okay, and that's not going to be auto by the time we're done. It's 18 by default. I'm turning off turbo core technology as well just so that I don't have any additional curve balls thrown in. So we're just looking for straight eight cores, all enabled, all at the same frequency. How high can we overclock? I've got my DDR3 at 1600 megahertz so I'm using HyperX Genesis from Kingston. Okay, moving down. Everything is going to be pretty default except we're disabling spread spectrum and we are going to be adjusting CPU voltage as needed in order to get stability at these settings that we're trying. So why don't we go ahead and change the CPU ratio to 22 and we'll leave it at default voltage and see what happens just as a starting experiment. I'll bring you guys along for the ride for this whole video so you can see how the overclocking experience is on the FX series chip. Booted up at 4.4 gigahertz but yeah that definitely wasn't going to happen at stock voltage so the voltage is turned up to 1.45 in the BIOS. You can see CPU-Z is reading quite a bit lower but you can take any software voltage readings with a huge grain of salt. So I'm going to go ahead and find out if this particular voltage is at least somewhat stable before I try to move on any further. So here we're just going to check task manager really quick, make sure all of the threads are appropriately loaded which it appears that they are. So if this runs for a couple minutes what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the BIOS, crank up the speed a little bit more and see if I can make it very unstable then I'll scale it back and do more long term testing. Well I made a critical benchmarking mistake. I started benching without my cat in my lap which he quickly remedied so now I will have more luck of course but I tried at 4.6 gigahertz at the same voltage settings I was using before 1.45. I didn't have any luck so I cranked the voltage up a little bit higher just to see what was the limiting factor in the overclock and I got a no post scenario which I wasn't able to recover from so I had to do a clear CMOS which meant all of my settings were restored to factory default including all my boot settings and all that which is a good lesson because I'm about to show you guys why you should always use overclocking profiles. So we're going to go ahead and with everything default I always use my last overclocking profile for that so set name we're going to call this default. So I haven't changed any performance settings. I mean I've got my RAM set to stock timings manually and I've got my boot settings all correct. I've turned off spread spectrum so I'm basically ready for overclocking but I haven't done anything yet so that means that if I have to clear the CMOS again what I can do is I can just go into the profile down here and then I can load profile 6 which will get me back to square one without actually being completely back to square one where I have to do things like turn off the full screen logo display for example. Alright so let's get back going here and I'm going to go ahead I'm not going to put the CPU voltage quite as high this time so we're going to go with 1.4 so I cranked it up to like 1.5 to see what would happen but let's go with like 1.465 which is pretty high pretty high this is like I would call this not necessarily 24 7 safe but we'll have a look at what kind of temperature we end up with before we say that for sure and then let's aim for 4.6 or 4.8 wait no that's not right 4.6 gigahertz see what happens here. So here's a quirky thing that is just it's one of those things that happens sometimes you can see we're at 4.6 gigahertz now booted into Windows I have increased the core voltage to 1.48 something I believe in the BIOS which is very high like I said before be careful increasing voltage like this but no matter what we did with the voltage by increasing the multiplier more I was not able to get stability but by increasing the bus speed now I booted into Windows so sometimes it is a combination between bus speed and multiplier that is going to get you the best stability now what I did do just to make sure that memory is not the limiting factors I turned it down to 1333 megahertz so it's a different divider so that yeah so that I can rule that out as the as the problem if we do run into stability because otherwise it would be overclocking the memory now I do have a slight overclock on the hyper transport bus as well as what is it there's something else that's slightly overclocked now that I've done this but I'm not going to worry too much about that so let's go ahead and fire up Prime95 and see if we have any stability whatsoever at these settings and my mouse froze it looks like we do not so I might have a bit of a dud of a chip so here's a luxury that I have that you guys don't I'm going to go ahead I'm going to try throwing it in the crosshair 5 and I'm going to see if the results I get are any different right now it looks like my limit on this particular CPU is going to be around the 4.4 to 4.5 gigahertz range alright so here I am in the crosshair 5 bios and I'm going to try straight for 4.6 gigahertz with the there you go target CPU frequency 4.6 gigahertz with my with 1.45 volts just to see what happens and then here we go 1.45 volts to see what happens and I also made another critical mistake in benchmarking I got out of my chair and now there are two grooming cats in it who don't look like they are likely to move low and behold we have a little bit of stability at 4.6 gigahertz so it's still running I'm going to go ahead and stop it now and let's see if we can push it any further on this particular board well I tried another full multiplier for 4.8 and that was not stable but I dialed it back.5 of a multiplier to 23.5 and we're at 4.7 and it's been priming for a little while now now one thing that makes me kind of uncomfortable about FX overclocking right now is I don't really have an accurate way to monitor processor uh excuse me processor temperatures because I know for a fact that is not right there's no way with the temperature of the water on the H100 that that is anywhere near right it's got to be significantly higher than that so um that worries me a little bit so I don't think I want to push the voltage too much higher given that 1.45 is the max I see most others doing right now but maybe I'll give it a little bit more and maybe I'll try increasing the bus speed rather than the multiplier to see how much closer we can get to that 4.8 gigahertz mark or even the magic 5 gigahertz who knows well I accidentally oh this looks like cool and quiet's on but I'll just move this around to generate some CPU load there you go I accidentally dialed up the bus speed faster than I had intended to and we ended up at 4.95 gigahertz and it booted into Windows miraculously so uh we did run into a bit of a bit of a hiccup where increasing the multiplier wasn't getting me the stability I needed but increasing the bus speed sort of did but I mean I am not expecting this to have any manner of stability in Prime 98 I expected it to crash by now and it hasn't so look at that we are up near the 5 gigahertz mark let's see if we can get there and let's find out how stable it is I said I wasn't going to do it but I did have to give it some more voltage to get into Windows at 5 gigahertz so here you go we are at 5 gigahertz it's 1.475 in the BIOS right now so let's see if we have any Prime stability whatsoever I really doubt it but still fun to see a 5 gigahertz suicide shot so there you have it in terms of what we were actually able to achieve with any stability I'd say 4.8 gigahertz is very doable thank you for checking out my little walkthrough on overclocking the bulldozer FX 8150 don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.