I hate Microsoft's activation scheme. Between that and UEFI it took 3 days to get an OS installed and activated... but it's good now.
Good call on my sig; other than tweaks to the voltage, the stable overclock is exactly what I predicted*. See below.
Max CPU test, Windows boot only:
After some experimenting, for the time being I'm calling this my "gaming stable" overclock.
*6 cores enabled, 4 threads OCCT small or large data set, 225 MCLK * 20, 1.47Vcore (1.45V after droop), DDR3-1800, minor bumps to NB and HT voltage, and some of the DIGI+ power specss.
Was stable for 45 minutes before it hit 63 C (where I told it to stop) which I'm saying is good enough for gaming. Most games only yews 2 threads fully, and perhaps 4 lightly. If I want to do encoding/compression/computation most likely I'll need to drop the OC and revert to stock settings, since 8 cores at stock will be considerably faster than 6 cores with a light oc.
Interesting note to Chew and the others who yews AMD Bulldozer or Piledriver architecture processors (this includes the more recent APUs as well as the FX series):
play around with the thread affinity for intensive processes (games etc).
http://windows7themes.net/cpus-how-to-s ... ows-8.htmlBy testing, I was able to determine that cores 2-3 (module 1) of my setup were the ones running hot, so that's the core pair that I disabled. I noticed lower power usage/temps when I assigned the OCCT threads to certain cores as opposed to others. For example, the 4 threads run coolest when assigned to cores in the same pair (in my case usually 4-5 and 6-7, but I also tested the 0-1 pair as well). This makes sense since various resources are shared in each module, so if both cores in a module are idle, it can go to a lower power state than if one core is idle and one is active. Also there's less shuffling between L1/L2 caches if processes stay in the same cores instead of being reassigned to a random core whenever they're scheduled (I would think, I'm not sure).
TL;DR: try assigning your games to various sets of core pairs and see what happens to performance and temps.
JKA specific: I installed it and played a bit today (!). Found and updated to ESM 9.2 and I think I got most of the maps.
Good news: At least with the configuration of Catalyst 13.4, Windows 8, and Radeon 7850, JKA/OpenGL runs natively without having to yews the old atiogl dll hack. Good to go out of the box (out of Steam in this case, though I own CDs as well).