EggXpert

ASRock AOD790GX / AMD740 / onboard GPU Stock Overclocking

Using AMD Utility, OC Tuner, Vista’s Experience Index, and ASRock BIOS overclocking features OC'ing was a breeze for the most part. I was able to OC at 3.7GHz before hitting the wall with a standard fan, AMD Phenom II X4 740 Black CPU, and 4GB OCZ Platinum memory.  Using Windows Experience Index check worked the best to see if the system would crash at a given setting and the AMD Utility worked nice for low end OC’ing and a quick bench mark test.  The best OC’ing for power consumption is 3.4GHz as the CPU voltage was the only parameter to be tweaked everything else could run auto/normal voltages.  For gaming you might run at 3.4GHZ with the onboard GPU at 720 or 740MHz if you don’t have a 16x PCIE addon card.  Unfortunately this MB didn't allow me the settings to OC my OCZ Platinum memory which could have gained me performance, 5-5-5-15 for the 4GB pack was all she would give me which is my stock memory setting, too bad.  One nice thing about this board is that I can save 3 different MB setups which is pretty slick for OC'ing and they have a OC setting to help stability called CPU/PCIE Async making overclocking more stable.  I have a 2003 spread sheet which you can see what I did to achieve the levels of OC'ing I did and is something that might help you with AMD OC'ing.  It is sheet protected with no password so that you can change only the variables that need to be changed.  If you wish to modify it further you can unprotect it easily since there is no password.  One nice thing about the spread is you can see the voltage adjustment curve as you hit the OC'ing wall and when you need to make little changes for stability it is easier to determine which ones to adjust.

Once I got to what seemed to be stable I would try to tweak some of the voltages down as low as I could before I lost that stability this worked very good and kept me from getting to far out of bounds with any of my voltage tweaks.

My basic procedure was to first just try overclocking with the CPU multiplier until voltage needed to be tweaked for stability.  System boots into Vista and wouldn't crash on bootup then I run the Windows Experience Test for a quick stability check.  I tried the AMD Utility Stability test but it wasn't as successful at crashing a non-stable system MS's was better.

After hitting that point I used AMD Utility setting target speeds & voltages and recording the working numbers in my spreadsheet.  When I got up to 3.5GHz I needed to do this on my own since the AMD tool didn't like going above 1.45vCore.

Overclocking can void your warranty so the responsibility is yours if things go south and you damage something so be careful and don't try to get too crazy.

Spreadsheet Download:

Edit by Sidicas: Hosted file on my site

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeq1z17/temp/ASRock_AOD790GX_Overclocking.rar