Asrock 970 extreme4

I'm not sure if you lowered the voltage, but note that lowering the frequency doesn't by itself do much to help the VRM as the voltage and heat production will still be very close to the stock value.

Regarding your cooling: Unless you have a top-down blowing CPU cooler, it probably doesn't help in cooling the VRM at all. Also, while have four case fans means your case is well ventilated, you can still increase VRM cooling by taking one of those four case fans and positioning it inside the case so that it blows air directly towards and over the VRM.

Finally, while I know this is not why you got an FX-8320 for, you might also want to try disabling two of your cores from the BIOS/UEFI. I've no personal experience on how big an effect it might have, but if you're lucky, you might be able to run those six cores at stock speeds with little to no issues. Even if you lose some max FPS, I'm sure the whole gaming experience will be more pleasant if the frame rates stop dropping drastically. Also, the effect of going from eight to six cores using the same GPU varies from game to game, as you can see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dLYPs41guM


Edited by PetrolHead - 14 Dec 2015 at 10:02am