We Overclock Phenom II to 4.9GHz
As you know, Tom's Hardware organized it's Overdrive overclocking finals in Paris over the weekend, bringing in teams from all over the world. The competitors benched and tweaked Intel's new Core i7 platform and achieved some significant scores and frequencies. But along side Core i7, wealso had the opportunity to overclock AMD"s new Phenom II. You read that right--the next AMD processor that's expected to launch in January '09.
4,957 MHz
Although AMD says nearly 6 GHz is achievable on the new Phenom II, we were not able to attain that frequency. However, with the helpof Jmax, we managed to reach 4,957 MHz. Remember however, that the 940 Phenom X4 BE II, is running at 3 GHz natively. We ran the processor on a Gigabyte motherboard based on AMD 790GX with DDR2 utilizing a cooling system with liquid nitrogen. At this point, based on what AMD tells us, the processor may have a higher potential, but it has an issue of locking at temperatures below -70 °C. To verify that the processor was stable at 4.9 GHz, we conducted some tests and it completed a SuperPi 1M run in 17,769 sec.
In practice, this new Phenom II in 45 nm seems very capable in terms of overclocking. Judging on what AMD says and how far we were able to push the processor, we're feeling fairly positive about its potential as a mainstream overclocking CPU. Air cooling should prove some interesting results. Look for some upcoming tests soon.
This could still be that Q6600 killer that AMD is hoping for!
But thumbs up for AMD, and those who OCd it
Yep. I think the fact that AMD fixed their OC problem is really the point here. Sure, Phenom II is still far behind the Core i7, but its a step in the proper direction. The wrong direction would be like what Intel did with the Pentium 4 back in the day.
Now if only AMD could figure out how Intel took such an architectural jump over them and rebound. Does anyone have any specs, does this really even compete with the Q6600 as was joked about?
Exactly. The idea for AMD is to become the mainstream while Core i7 is still in its enthusiast stage. It'll be a huge benefit for them if they can outpace Core 2 in the months leading up to i7 becoming mainstream.
although it seems that Tom's was doing something different than AMD for overclocking since AMD managed 6+ GHz on 1.9Vcore? Although either way, I'd like a quad and 3 GHz is definitely a plus.
+1
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/4gopti,0101-172207-0-2-3-1-png-.html
So at 4ghz it got 17.769 seconds the multiplier is only at 20x on the picture that shows the pi calculations when the 4.9ghz is at 24x
BTW, my Xeon E3110 @ 3.87 GHz does it in 16 seconds, but the current Phenom X4 9950 BE @ 3.4 GHz kicks its ass in anything multithreaded and certain applications, plus it seems quicker for basic functions in Vista.
Q6600 killer? Intel is set to make the Q6600 EOL 1H 2009... i wanna hope its a helluva lot better than Q6600 a new AMD cpu competing with an EOL cpu from intel yay... NOT