Great article! As always, Tom's showing another point of view for handling your hardware. And, yeah, Fusion works Bigtime! Better performance guaranteed.

Good article, I have always been curious about how effective certain clock increases would actually be; especially for locked AMD cpus as you have to retard the ram frequency to get the core clock up higher which may result in a bottleneck.

Useful article.

About the higher-than-spec voltage applied - however, it is not recommand to set higher that safety limit (recommanded by AMD) voltage AND CnQ enabled together - the CPU could become much less overclockable after a short period, due to damage by switching voltage up and down from unsafe voltage.

Useful article for amd users. We are waiting like this article for core i7 cpus too.

Well I'm already running my Phenom II 940 at 3.6, but I'm doing this with a mix of lower multiplier than 18 and slightly higher HTT clock, I'm running at 17.5x206=3605, ofcourse @ 1.4v.. I think it's a good idea to try the same overclocking speed but with the higher HTT clock, as this will increase the performance a little ( RAM will be overclocked too ).. it will be harder I know but it may worth the try...

ehh "But how far should you go? Efficiency has become almost equally important to performance," efficiency is more like the opposite of performance with overclockers really!
It's pointles to even consider efficiency as an overclocker! It's a bit like trying to tune a H2 for economy instead of torque or high rev horsepower .... you shouldn't have picked a H2 in the first place if efficiency is a concern.
Power saving features for when systems aren't doing anything are welcome, but anything else is imo irrelevant.

Indeed a Nice article after a Much time on Tomshardware, Straight and Up to the point in describing about the benefits of Overclocking..

Indeed a nice article. What i don't really "get" is why a Jetway mainboard was used? I can't even find a retailer in europe that has it on sale...

Hey Chris, thanks for getting the site's metadata updated. The charts became visible while I was reading this article.
Neiroatopelcc has a point, but Fusion should address that. Striving for performance does not mean striving for waste, it means ignoring it. Well, I don't think anyone would argue that ignorance is a good thing. People will be able to OC to the teeth when they need it, but still be efficient when they don't.

Great Overclocking article, but how about an underclocking article for the HTPC crowd? I'm kinda curious how much power different Phenom IIs use between 800 mhz & 2 ghz.

i still cant understand why does the i7 965 is 4x expensive than 940 ?

what is fun about all this coments is that despite all things you say
im from argentina and this OC does not exist here jajaja
and in addition we have the devaluation of our money and it cost to us almost 4 times what costs you anything
example here a core 2 duo e8400 costs 800 pesos ... that is 220 dolars + -
and i presume that even that in where you live isnt the real cost... instead much lower

great page toms hardware by the way... the only thing is that everything is so expensive that i can only see the things but dont have it jajaja

yeah, ariel is right.. im from Argentina too.. as a computer technician i've seen a lot of monsters (super mega cooled I7's super mega overclocked Phenom's) but is not normal. i was thinkin on buying a system like this one (i cant afford a 1100 Watts PSU so i will go for something like 600 to 750W) and with that money me and my girlfriend live 3 months(including taxes). jejeje (no display included in the prize 'coz i already have a monitor).. I can't find anything that sounds similar to "Jetway" here.. so maybe i'll go for a MSI mother.. But i still have doubts as for the cooling.. What cooling solution was used in this article? stock cooler? the on ei see in the picture looks like a zalman or something like that.. can anyone answer that for me?..
Thanks in advance
Tom

I agree, this seems to be an usefull article. But as was said in the above, could it be possible to see an article where that "sweet point" 3.6 Ghz would be achieved using different HTT clock? Is it really worth of it? How it affects the power consumption? Maybe a very little, but it would be nice to see!
You all ready have proven that 3.6 GHz is the sweet point with normal HTT clocks, can the situation be different with different HTT settings? Or is it too much relative to the individual CPU you hapens to have?

All is all this was interesting article to read! Keep it up!

Very nice article
I was considering buying something a little more fancy than my OCZ Vanquisher so that i could go above 1.4v, but apparently there's no point, so thank you for saving me ~$100CDN.

There are still some unresolved questions here. Why a Jetway mobo with a 790GX chipset? Something with a 790FX would have made more sense. Why would you leave CNQ on during overclocking? The first thing every OC guide will tell you is to TURN CNQ OFF. Also, how much does power consumption/temperature increase as NB frequency goes up? i.e. if you increase the reference clock, rather than the multi, the NB freq. goes up. How does that impact stability/power consumption/temperature?

Still some mysteries here, but a nice article nonetheless.

To Chris or someone,
I dont know if the other users are experiencing this but every few pages I click through on this site, especially during the articles, I get a message from my antivirus alerting me of a virus from a file when im loading a new page. I click "Deny" each time and all seems well.

Virus: HEUR:Trojan.Script.Iframer
File: http://ad.trafficmp.com/a/js?plid=10637

Im using Firefox, Windows 7 build 7000, and Kaspersky for AV

Coop--let me report this and see what happens. The malware issue we saw before was solved. I sincerely hope this isn't something new. Thanks for the heads-up!

This article is exactly how i overclock. Default voltage max stable, and then i back it off a little bit, or ill do a tiny increase in voltage but no more.

Anything more then that are for 2 reason:

1) Bragging rights
2) People who don't care about the cost of their computer parts.

If you have money to buy the latest and greatest every time it comes out and are changing hardware every 6 months, by all means push the chip to the limit and throw the voltage up, who cares if it frys.

But its kinda funny when you see someone on a budget pushing their hardware with massive voltage increases ets, its just dumb if you cant afford to fry it.