No1Spank

I think a good name for the Apprentice league would be the Hardcore league, I'd submit a TEC submission even though I'm mainly using air just because it would sound such a cool league to be in.

I see you can just type it in before submission which I will always do in future. Feel free to remove all of my older submissions although it would have been nice to keep them for reference.

OK, thanks for the info, I've submitted my FX6300 CPUZ for div IV competition with my screenshot in email part of validation. Do I need to rename my computer?

Check my FX6300 CPUZ submission it now has my name on the screenshot in email address.

5.2ghz is slow for an FX processor anyhow

Case solved!! I was reported I believe because I reported the guy who reported me for not having pictures of his rig. I'll happily take on all comers in a live head to head with the same gear. (water or air because I don't know how to use anything else yet). Reminds me of the bull####ers in my motorbike days, I smashed pretty much all challengers on the road so had to take up racing to find some real competition.

Been reported for validation not matching user name. My computer is named OVERCLOCKINGRIG as I have multiple machines. I can upload a screenshot with my name on notepad but I have my FX6300 in at the moment and am not swapping it with the 8120 just for that.

Corsair H100

Somebody call nvidiaforever out to a live competition. If they had them where I live I'd love to take part, even just going head to head with one person either with my own rig or some pre selected binned parts would be good fun. For me that is where it's at if overclocking ever gets big enough. The great thing about live head to head competition is there is nowhere to hide.

I take my rig outside to my van sometimes in winter, lowest ambient temp so far 2 degrees C as you have to be out there with it I don't fancy being colder. I grew up in a 200 year old farm house with no heating and once had -10 degrees C in my bedroom, would I have had to wait until spring to be an enthusiast overclocker? My idle temp with Sempron 145 and a large fan blasting the heat sink is just under 20 degrees. I've run benches inside first with exact same hardware and found the drop in temps is worth roughly 2 - 3 mhz on the BLK so not a major difference. I thought the enthusiast league was all about keeping cost down and things simple so a novice doesn't run as big a risk of damaging hardware if they make a mistake. I want to try a TEC cooler but don't know what I'm doing and would rather have someone show me how to set one up before doing it myself. I don't want to rely 100% on the internet and wreck my hardware as I only bench kit I use (or have used) in my own gaming rigs or occasionally bits from rigs I am building for other people. I can't afford to replace fried parts.

Mine still runs sweet, the only chip I have that I might push some more is my FX-8120 but that will wait until winter, only on here to check memory optimum memory timings for a rig I'm building for someone else.

Thanks for the reply but I mean't could I use my fx6300 or unlocked phenom II for the rookies competition.

Sorted pi scores but can i enter competition with 2 cores shut down on my fx6300? If and when I get my old computer back from my ex girlfriend it has a motherboard which can unlock my phenom ii to a quad, can i use that?

Was going to enter a couple of rounds last night but I have an FX-6300 and it's limited to quad core. Could I disable two cores and enter? Also is there any reason my super pi results with the FX 6300 won't update in the rankings? I'm still showing over 20 seconds in 1m and I've submitted results in the 17 second bracket more than once.

I've only been overclocking for benchmarks since the new year began so I guess I am a rookie (overclocked my first computer in 2007 really). Why is the XTU benchmark part of the competition? None of my processors can use it as they are all really old Intel or AMD. Can I still enter results into the other two rounds? Got some new memory and a desk fan coming this week.

Thanks for your help, that CPU was bought by me 2nd had 2 years ago and has always been run overclocked (not that I use it a lot) since so maybe it was degrading and I just pushed it over the edge.

I've only been playing around a couple of weeks but have started to suss out how to tweak various settings in increments to gradually increase performance. Saturday I spent the afternoon playing with an Athlon ii x3 440. I managed to get a lot of benchmarks to run with almost 4ghz on the clock which I was quite pleased with as I don't take the voltage past the point it changes colour in the bios (about 1.437v). Anyhow I was just changing some settings as it refused to run on Pcmark05 when it shut off and wouldn't fire up. I chucked it in my old board which runs ddr2 and found that it will only run properly after I leave the bios in single channel memory mode with 1 stick of ram (I tried ganged mode). I'm guessing I damaged the northbridge when it was running at about 2600mhz. I think I could move up the ranks with other kit I have but am scared to crank up the volts even with sorted cooling. If I decide to say run my FX 6300 with 1.6v how long can I run it before doing damage? If I shut it off for half hour after every run to cool right down would that be safe? I might get into extreme overclocking one day but need to learn basic stuff like this first before I cost myself a lot of wasted money. Thanks in advance

Oops! Didn't read second page I see you have OCCT, maybe you have particularly golden samples of board and processor. Check it doesn't throttle during stress test, my FX 8120 used to all the time on my old board.

Try a program called OCCT, if you can run the default stress test for 30 minutes you are golden. Don't run for hours on end as you will burn out the VRM's on the board, few games are likely to stress your cpu and memory as much as OCCT. Keep an eye on your temps you don't want the CPU much over 60 degrees C because the VRM's will probably be at least 5 degrees higher. At 5.0ghz I doubt your 965 will run OCCT for 2 minutes, but it might run a few benchmarks like Cinebench.

I had a blog a bit like yours for a while until I got bored. Mine was more about the CPU, what I did find though was that if you put a powerful graphics card with a weak cpu you get worst performance than a weak graphics card and a weak cpu. Also some games work better with nvidia cards (Skyrim) and some work better with AMD (Shogun 2 Total War). Newer AMD FX processors are hopeless with older Nvidia graphics cards (GTX260). Then there is crossfire / SLI and varying amount of graphics memory to consider. Graphics memory becomes more important the more powerful the card is especially in crossfire or SLI. Games like Skyrim which use a lot of GPU graphics mem are affected by the speed of the system memory. The variables, benchmarks and configurations are never ending..... Shame I shut my site down only a couple of months ago, you could have took it off me for a small price, had loads of results and info but I stopped working on it about a year ago to concentrate on my motorcycle site.

Never managed to get this bench to run yet, quits due to error.

I've had the same problem on a couple of futuremark benches but I was under the impression that it doesn't matter under hardware bot rules so I posted some of the submissions. I only started on here a week and a half ago so am still learning the ropes and only low level at the moment, I can't see the point of un clocking my hardware just so it says valid result as with 3 lots of CPU-Z and GPU-Z open it's pretty clear I'm not making it up. Also even when everything is ok at least one benchmark will foul up when I switch processors or graphics cards especially when I have to re-install drivers. Getting a lot of the benchmarks to run is as much of a challenge as overclocking some of the time.

Board is aircooled