The first thing we want to do is to disable AMD Cool and Quiet and C1E support. You can leave these on if you are trying to save money by being energy aware, but the benefits are quite minor and I like to see the clock speed we achieve, all the time. These reduce multipliers and voltage to your CPU when you aren't doing anything intensive. Real men disable them 🙂
Above we have adjusted our CPU FSB frequency from 200 to 240. Most systems will hit this fine, although you may need to reduce to 235 on some motherboards. The more observant among you will notice that this has also increased the northbridge speed from 2000 mhz to 2400mhz.
Again most systems will handle 2400mhz, but if instability is encountered you may need to adjust the CPU-NB ratio to 8x which will decrease the speed to 1920mhz. This doesn't really affect performance.
Above you can see that our increase CPU-FSB increase has also adjusted the memory speeds from 1333mhz to 1600mhz automatically. Our ram can handle these speeds fine so we can just save the bios changes, exit and reboot into Windows.
Our first overclocked settings once booted into Windows. We are now running at 3360mhz, 160mhz faster than the AMD 1090T at a fraction of the cost.
This increase has given us a full extra point score in Cinebench R11.5 to 5.90. Not bad for nothing but there is more to come.
Again we reboot and enter the bios.
This time we adjust the frequency to 265 and reduce the CPU-NB Ratio to either 8x or 9x. I know this particular system can handle 2400mhz on the CPU-Northbridge frequency so 2385 is fine. If you run into issues however, reduce this to 8x which may increase stability for you.
Moving down we notice that memory speeds are now up to 1767mhz which is out of specification for DDR1600mhz. Some modules will handle this fine, and some will require a little extra voltage. For the purposes of this article however we aren't increasing voltages and we are playing it safe, so we change the ‘auto' setting .
Changing the multiplier of the memory to 1:2:66 means we can get it back within specifications. 1413mhz in this specific case. We can either adjust timings in the DRAM to make it tighter for added performance or increase voltage and try running at 1700mhz+. Lets keep it simple today and suffer a slight performance penalty for maximum stability.
This is what you should be seeing above before we save. Our memory is at 1413mhz, the CPU is at 3.71ghz with a 265mhz CPU FSB frequency and CPU ratio is auto (you can manually change that to 14x if you wish but most bioses keep it locked). the CPU-NB frequency is the one you need to watch. Ours is sitting at 2385mhz which I know is perfectly fine on our MSI motherboard, but below I changed it to 8x to show you the adjustment speed – which is 2120mhz, still slightly overspec but will add some stability for lesser motherboards.
Many enthusiast grade motherboards allow you to save various profiles now for simple recall later, the image above is our 3.7ghz setting named and saved to a position.
Next save your bios changes and reboot into Windows 7.
Above we can see our fully overclocking settings without any voltage increases made in the bios. The CPU is still idling at just over 30c in our room (25c ambient).
Again we tested with Cinebench 11.5 and got a final score of 6.44. which is considerably better than the score we achieved with the CPU out of the box (4.91). For those of you who are cautious about voltages or just new to overclocking, this is the safest way to get almost a gigahertz extra performance out of your new AMD 6 core CPU. There are even more benefits to be gained if you decided to crank various voltages but we will leave that for another day. Ideally, speak with an expert like the guys at YOYOTech. If you're near London, pop in and chat with them about the various issues you need to consider like mainboard BIOS, cooling solution and thermal interface material.
KitGuru says: Let us know how you get on, or other tips you may have to help our readers.
With no extra voltage? bloody hell. I might pick one of these up just for kicks.
Thats very helpful and I know a lot of people dont like increasing voltages, so should come in handy for many KG readers.
900mhz without any increasing in any voltage areas. thats really very good. AMD must have some headroom on these chips, thats for sure.
that was a fantastic read Zardon, thank you. My friend is thinking of getting this processor, and it seems to be even better value for money now after reading this.
Thats excellent, quite a good overclocker and modestly clocked by AMD, perhaps too modestly.
The 1090T is good value too, its possible to get 4.2ghz out of it easy enough. that said, the 1055T is better value overall I think.
How does the overclocked 1055T compare to say an intel CPU then? whats comparible at those speeds?
its amazing how weird these manufacturers sell their products. if something hits 3.7ghz out of the box without voltage then why not just sell it at close to that speed? 900mhz? thats basically three more possible sales from AMD if they rebadge the thnig 3 times more.
Francois you hit the nail on the head. they can clock it 200mhz higher a few more times and resell it again. I wonder how they like these articles though explaining to newbs how they can do it easily 🙂
I would like to hear from the public about this if anyone else has done it via this guide.
Hey I have the same motherboard. When I get paid I might treat myself to a 1055T, my CPU is a bit long in the tooth now.
I have an Intel i920 running at 3.8 and I ran the Cinebench 11.5 and got a 6.41 really impressed me to bad i just got this setup in March 🙁
Great read.
One of the best OC walkthroughs i’ve seen..
Why dont other people go into as much depth??
Well done!
the question here is will the system run stable at only this voltage
Can I overlock my PC same as your way? will i get any problem? thanx.
my PC has : Motherboard-Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H AMD 880G AMD AM3 CPUs, Dual Channel DDR3, 5x SATA 6Gb/s , 1x eSATA, RAID, 8x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0, 7.1 HD Audio, SPDIF, Firewire, 1x Gigabit LAN
CPU: AMD 1055t
Power Sup: 400 W.
I hitted 3640mhz with no extra voltage but i will try to pick it up to 4ghz with some more voltage…
i had try to overclock to 3.4GHz but it became unstable. did i need to change my psu to Bronze rated n upgrade my RAM to 8GB? because i use CM extreme 500w and Team Elite 4GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz