AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition: New Hope?

Features
By The Editors of Tom's Hardware
published

Overclocking - AMD OverDrive Not Yet Mature

Theoretically, one would expect that software written by AMD specifically for the Phenom processor should work without any problems. However, during testing we realized that the OverDrive utility is not yet technically mature; it is still plagued by many problems.

In some cases, a version offered directly by the motherboard manufacturer for a certain motherboard caused the system to crash as soon as we attempted to overclock it. In the case of our MSI board, the utility gave us an error message telling us it had failed to find an AMD processor in the system.

Let us describe to you a scenario we encountered that is a perfect example of why AMD OverDrive is not yet suitable for overclocking. First, you have to choose the menu entry "Advanced mode" from within the "Preference" submenu in order to enable the feature that lets you change the multiplier. The tool will respond by displaying a warning that your system may become unstable if you change any settings.

The Editors of Tom's Hardware
3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ShadowKai
    I think on page 14 the author meant:

    "When Cool'n'Quiet is deactivated, idle power consumption rises to 51 watts. The jump in power consumption at 2.70 GHz is a direct result of the core voltage increase from 1.250 V to 1.400 V."

    And the bars for Phenom 9600 BE and Phenom 9600 BE (CnC) should be switched around.
    Reply
  • I think it's also important to mention the fact that Vista SP1 includes it's OWN TLB fix which overrides the bios setting of many boards. I used an app that works in conjunction with Crystal CPUID to change the MSR directly to deactivate this secondary TLB fix. It caused a dramatic improvement in performance; the quick and simple WinRAR bench went from 232 to ~1300 after the fix. Just think it's worth mentioning!
    Reply
  • I think I may have found a new problem with this bug. I have a Phenom X4 9600, and have tried two different motherboards. The problem occurs when running Windows 7. BSOD with a message stating that the operating system did not receive an clock interupt signal from the second processor. At first I thought it was a bios problem, but have since had to replace the motherboard. Tried Windows 7 again after replacing the motherboard and still having the same problem.
    Reply