With all of the necessary drivers installed and a few system reboots later, we were ready to dive into the BIOS settings, as well as overclocking. Luckily for us, MSI makes the process extremely simple with their OC Genie software. OC Genie automatically determines a stable overclock for your processor and graphics card based on known performance, available cooling and a host of other factors. This was perfect for me, as I had little experience overclocking and wanted to be able to play around with the settings on my own after we were finished. The AMD FX-8350 is rated for performance at 4.0GHz, however, OC Genie was able to get a stable overclock at 4.2GHz. We attempted to manually get a higher overclock (around 4.5 GHz), but the PC wasn't having it, crashing a few minutes afterwards.
But, I was extremely satisfied with the result. With Windows installed on the SSD, in combination with the speedy processor and MSI's Fast Boot allows the system to be powered up in less than ten seconds, a far cry from my old HP Pavillion notebook ususally booting in about 30-45 seconds.
Cooling was a big consideration in the build, especially since I didn't know if I would be overclocking at first and if my residence building at university would have air conditioning. Luckily, my case's fans, the Asus Grpahics card cooler and the Hyper 212 EVO seem to be keeping my system consistently cool. Using MSI's Control Centre, setting all of the fans to maximum whe the PC is idle will keep both the CPU and motherboard around 25°C. Under load, the CPU will often rise to around 35-45°C and Graphics card will often rise to between 50-60°C, however, this was expected and is still well within the safe operating temperatures of both.
Be sure to check out Part 5: Benchmarking - Next Wednesday at 12PM
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