tfw u boot into your pc @ 5ghz on air cooling

I guess the moral of the story is, don’t try to overclock a CPU on an affordable MSI motherboard. It just, kind of does what it wants. Basically I can overclock just fine from the Command Center program and set the turbo speed to what I want it to go up to.

So if I’m rendering video, CPU can now go faster than normal, but if I’m doing nothing, it slows down. Makes sense so far, right?

Now the command center program cannot make permanent changes to the system. Well that’s okay. That’s not the end of the world, you figure out what settings you want, then go to the bios and change them. So I can be stable at 4.5Ghz on air cooling. Cool. That’s a base clock of 100, and a multiplier of 45. Go to BIOS, change ratio to 45, boot it back up and be good, right? Well upon reboot, it was running 5Ghz. Well that’s not what I set. And it was staying there, yes programs are loading, so on, no worries.

Okay, fans cranking, programs are loaded, Utilization is a few percent, and it’s just roasting away at 5GHz. That’s, starting to look bad. Playing around with a few more settings, it actually boots at 4.5Ghz…and stays there. Still not what I’m going for. Sure there is a one button overclock built into the motherboard, but if it can’t handle me changing a number manually, I don’t want to see what it will do automatically. The voltage limits they tend to set are sketchy, and I doubt it would accept a change. At that point I gave up, and everything is back to default. I don’t even know if I ended up with XMP turned on for my RAM, but that’s enough for today.

And upon opening the Command Center, it has my settings. So I have no idea how any of this works. Considering it’s a dice roll for the program to load. So I guess if I wasted this hour, but ended up with a 7% overclock, I will make up that time in 14 hours.

tldr; Overclock cheap MSI boards with the Command Center and just cross fingers it works, don’t go to the BIOS.