Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Overclocking FX6300
I am advising a friend who wants to buy a gaming pc. And so the build has an FX6300 and a Radeon270 GPU. I heard that FX uses alot of power, and I began to wonder if there would be room for overclocking the cpu with an XFX 550 watt PSU?
Basically, he has set a budget of 6000,- danish kroners, and I have come up with this:
8 gb 1600 mhz Corsair Vengeance
5891,- kr before OS. The plan is to overclock the FX6300 mildly, but enough to make it pull ahead from an i3 build and justify the Heatsink. Probably just on stock voltages, as it can then save power when it throttles down. Setting VCore at it highest and overclocking from there is probably not in his interest, as the electricity bill starts to show itself. I heard the stock HS from AMD is a noisy and bad one, and a good heatsink is a nice thing to have for system longevity regardless of overclock or not.
Now if he wants an OS included in the budget, I need to shave of the price. Easiest would be that he use his cd and HDD from his old system. But his system is an old one, and I suspect these pieces of hardware are due for replacement.
Secondly ditch the SSD and buy an OS instead. Easy to do but I really would like to be able to add in a decent SSD.
I could step down on the GPU, but not really by all that much. I have been pretty loudmouthed about how far you can get today for a budget build if you do it yourself. So if he chooses to build, it should impress when he turns on his games.
A gigabyte GTX660 is really the cheaper alternative. A decent card in itself, but last gen, and not all that much cheaper.
I could of course also, ditch the heatsink, and accept no overclocking, hoping the AMD HS isn't a noisy litlle bastard.
I could shave of 200.- kr also be getting him the cheapest cabinet I can find. ANTEC, maybe it's not half bad?
If he chooses to buy premade, he can get a very reasonable deal, as competition in Denmark has driven the price down to where it's actual hard to do it much cheaper yourself.
Prebuild. He gets an Intel Quadcore, but no SSD, and 500 gb of HDD. A cheap case.
Asides my overclocking question, I'm interested in opinions and if anyone has something to remark.
Comments
Certainly want have any issues with any mmo at stock speed.
From my quick calculations, you would have about 110W for the CPU after all of your other components. I used a conservative estimate for the drives and motherboard, as well as a 75% efficiency for the power supply which accounts for aging. Basically, don't overclock much with this system. The default turbo speeds would be fine, but anything too extreme would push the life-span of the power supply down and may lead to instability as the system ages.
I did not include overclocking of the video card in my estimates.
Overclocking is finicky, as there's no telling how much your power use will go up, only that it will go up. I usually use double the stock power, and this isn't far from the mark on a good overclock, but if you get into some high voltages and pushing it as hard as you can you can even exceed that.
R9 270 has a TDP of 150W
(GTX660 has a TDP of 115W but isn't nearly as nice of a card imo)
FX6300 has a TDP of 95W
And 100W for everything else
So at stock, your looking at 150 + 95 + 100, or 345W
If you OC the CPU, double that number
If you OC the GPU, double that number
You don't really overclock everything else though, so that static 100W can pretty much stay as-is
Overclocking, yeah... I would be careful with that. There's nothing saying that OCing by 1Mhz will automatically double your watts, it's not linear, but it does scale somewhat. Modest overclocks you should be ok, but pay attention to instabilities -- random reboots, BSODs. It's possible it could be that you have more headroom on your silicon and your just over-stressing the 550W power supply (due to age, due to thermals, and/or due to outright overcurrent).
I'm using one for planetside 2, which is the most cpu intensive mmo, and I'm not needing to clock it.
First of all, thanks for all you input, I'm glad I asked this question here. If I understand you correctly, then a cpu overclock would end up at 440 Watts (maximum). 80% efficiency of 550Watt is 440Watts, so it would seem I can just squeeze it in.
The GPU in question is factory overclocked, and that might increase its powerdraw. On the other hand, the goal was to take the CPU abit above a FX6350, which has a powerdraw of 125 Watts, so I would very likely not double the wattages.
Anyway, I am penny pinching, and a 650 Watt costs less than 100,- kr more, so that should be doable. But I had a hunch I might be hitting the roof of the PSU, so I am glad I got that clarified.
Well... a CPU overclock could end up at 450W total draw. It could go way higher. It could go no where near that and be way lower.
I use a x2 multiplier because it's fairly conservative thumbrule, but there's no hard and fast law that will say exactly what a piece of silicon will do when you overclock it - largely because each piece is going to act just a little bit differently.
Even the TDP that the manufacturer lists: that's a specification number. They aren't saying the chip will use 95W at 100% load at stock speeds. They are just specifying that the chip will use no more than 95W at 100% load at stock speeds... one chip may come in at 92W, the very next one off the assembly line may come in at 74W under the exact same conditions. And when you overclock each of those, that difference gets exacerbated.
So take that x2 with a grain of salt - if you keep your overclocks mild (basically anything that doesn't require a voltage bump) it's a safe number and it would be a very rare piece of silicon that could OC far enough without a voltage bump and exceed double it's TDP. But start playing with voltage, and even double may not be enough.
I suppose my original advice still holds though: try it, go up slowly and in small increments, and if you start to see weird stuff back it off... I just don't want you to get the wrong impression about a thumbrule that's just meant to get you in the right general ballpark with regard to PSU sizing and try to use it to calculate an exact power draw on a really close build.
If I were you I would drop the HDD instead of the SSD initially. If you need to shave enough off the budget for an OS.
It is much easier to add HDD later to use as bulk storage than it would be to reinstall an OS onto an SSD when adding it later.
He may be some what limited with space for a time but that is easily managed.