AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition: New Hope?

Features
By The Editors of Tom's Hardware
published

Overclocking - AMD's OverDrive Badly Supported

There are two ways to change the multiplier to overclock the processor. The classical approach would be to go through the BIOS, which requires rebooting the system whenever you wish to make any kind of change. The second option is to use AMD's OverDrive tool.

AMD's OverDrive tool

You can download the OverDrive tool from the motherboard manufacturers' support websites. Although AMD has an info website for its tool, there is no download link. There isn't even any information regarding the latest version of the tool.

It is up to the motherboard makers to test new versions of the OverDrive tool for compatibility with their products, and offer them for download on their websites. The upshot is that there are many different versions of the tool floating around the Internet. During the time we ran our tests, we found various versions of the OverDrive utility on the support sites of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte.

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