Phenom 9950 Cracks The 4GHz Barrier On LN2
At the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, members of AwardFabrik.de managed to break 4GHz using liquid nitrogen cooling on an AMD Phenom 9950 processor. CPU-Z did not correctly validate the clockspeed however, and the AwardFabrik team are still unsure why this was the case.
Nevertheless, at a clock speed of 3952MHz, the team broke a SuperPi 1M record for AMD CPUs - 19.954 seconds - which is quite impressive for an AMD system considering SuperPi heavily favors the Core 2 architecture. Other hardware used included a Foxconn A79-S motherboard and an OCZ 1000W power supply.
Intel will soon change the overclocking scene with Core i7. Intel’s platform will finally lose its ancient Front Side Bus and adopt the QuickPath Interconnect for a high-bandwidth, point-to-point connection with the chipset which is dedicated to I/O traffic. The new interconnect will mean enthusiasts currently using Intel systems will have to break old habits and learn new methods to successfully overclock their CPU. This interconnect is reportedly quite temperamental when the reference clock is run much over its default speed of 133MHz, so this may pose problems for overclockers when using CPUs with upwards locked multipliers. Newer BIOS and motherboard revisions should improve stability of the QPI when overclocked.
SuperPi 1M may soon become obsolete with the current world record sitting at 7 seconds and quickly running out of headroom for faster times. Nehalem’s improved single-threaded performance when in Turbo Mode may push that world record further.
E8600 is $275 and QX9770 $1460. 9950BE was $205 yesterday at Newegg. Of course E8600 and QX9770 are much faster but you got to give AMD something.
lol if you don't mind, follow the link at the beginning of the article, you'll see that they managed 4050
and there has been plenty of reports of core2 OCs in the news recently...
Mate, when Phenom breaks 3.5GHz it's a big deal
It made 4GHz. For Phenom, that is a big deal.
Sold!