Overclocking the MSI 890GXM G65 and the AMD Phenom II 965 Black

The MSI 890GXM was a very interesting motherboard to overclock, because there are several ways to do it. For most, the easiest way would be to use either the OC Genie Auto OC, Easy OC switch, AMD's AOD or through the BIOS. Each of which are user friendly.

The first option is OC Genie Auto OC which is a MSI exclusive BIOS option. This is a very simple procedure to execute. Select the option in the BIOS and reboot. Done. With this enabled, we netted 4080MHz from the stock speed of 3.4GHz of the Phenom II 965.

The AMD AOD or Over Drive gives much more control over all the settings you would naturally find in the BIOS without entering the BIOS. We played around with AOD for awhile getting 4GHz was fairly easy.

Last, we resorted to the good old BIOS overclocking which is a little bit more challenging and time consuming, but to me, more fun. Dialing the CPU voltage in at a save 1.5v using a Thermolab Baram CPU cooler, we were able to get 4180GHz. This is was without doing much more to the BIOS than playing with the voltage of the CPU and increasing the clock and multiplier of the CPU. And because we were using a Black Edition processor we were giving the CPU multiplier options of 4 up to 32.5. We only need 20 to get our max overclock.