This motherboard + overclocking = explosion?

[Rennn]

I was wondering if this mATX motherboard would be okay for overclocking a Phenom II 955?

If not, please recommend one, but it needs to be micro ATX.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128565

 

Also, what would be a good aftermarket cooler for a Phenom II?

Edited March 21, 2014 by Rennn

[Werne]

If not, please recommend one, but it needs to be micro ATX.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128565

When it comes to mATX and overclocking Phenom II, that board is the best you can find, that thing's successor is bad for overclocking and most other mATX AM socket boards don't have a VRM heatsink. It'll be perfectly fine, it has a VRM heatsink, a 4+1 power phase is not that great but at least it's made decent and sturdy, and it's regarded as a board fit for overclocking even when it comes to 125W Vishera CPUs. The only problem I can see is that you use DDR3-1600 if I recall correctly, which will run on DDR3-1333 9-9-9-24 on this board (JEDEC standard) so you'll have to overclock RAM back to 1600 with whatever latency it uses manually by upping BCLK and playing with advanced memory controls (you'd have to do that anyway since you overclock through BCLK).

 

Don't expect any extreme overclocks on that thing though, I'd say you'll get anywhere from 3.6-3.9 on it before you hit a VCore/thermal wall. Since your Phenom is non-BE you're limited by the BCLK frequency, and BCLK on Gigabyte boards can clock to anywhere from 233-266MHz on stock NB voltage (at x16 multi your Phenom has, that's a 3.73-4.26GHz range), mine can hit 252MHz before requiring more volts for NB. If you're aiming at 4-4.2GHz range you'll likely need a real ATX board with 8+2 power phase for 24/7 use since Phenom II often needs a large amount of voltage to get past a certain frequency, which is usually in the 3.8-4.0GHz range, luckier chips have that VCore wall at 4.2GHz. You'll likely hit a CPU thermal wall at that point anyway, so you can't really fry the board.

 

As for cooling, depends on how much you want to spend. CoolerMaster Hyper 212 EVO is a mid-range cooler that seems to be the king of price/performance, giving excellent cooling performance for little money once you use decent fans in push-pull (apparently, making sidewalls on it helps too). Never used that thing myself but people swear on it, and it should be adequate. I use a Mugen 4 on my 8320 which is a high-end cooler that would definitely keep a Phenom nice and cool, but that thing is pretty big and pretty expensive ($50-75 in US and nearly twice the size of a 212 EVO). I'd go for CM 212 EVO or better, going for a worse performing cooler would bring weak gains from overclocking since you'd hit the thermal wall sooner.

 

And just so you know, you'll need fans blowing over Northbridge and VRM heatsinks on that board, once you go upping the frequencies and voltages those components will get hotter and board will begin throttling the CPU to cool the board down for a moment. I use two 60mm 4000RPM fans from stock AMD coolers lowered to 1800RPM to cool my NB/VRMs, chipset cooling is the only thing those fans are actually good for. You can use something like Antec Spot Cool for that, I prefer making chipset fans myself out of random fans I find since they make less noise that way.

Edited March 21, 2014 by Werne