AMD's Secret Weapon
On the AMD front, the company has been really falling behind Intel as of late, but as we saw, AMD has several things coming down the pipe that could put it back into very competitive range with intel. For example, the company is set to start releasing Phenom processors that almost beg to be overclocked. We were able to look at a number of boards at the show this year that support sanctioned overclocking of processors through use of the southbridge.
Southbridge SB700 and SB750 chips will support multiplier unlocking and can even overclocking the CPU on demand, depending on system load and conditions. We were informed that running a 2.8 GHz chip that has the correct pin-outs will enable you to hit even 3 GHz and higher to 3.2 GHz if you’re using a SB750 based motherboard.
Our sources indicated that motherboards with 780G, 790FX and 790GX chipsets will allow users to overclock via the southbridge with a BIOS setting while some boards will even integrate a hardware button for instant performance increases. Don’t mistaken this button for the infamous "turbo button" however. At the time when turbo buttons were popular, it was used actually in reverse, where "turbo" was really normal CPU operating frequency, and turbo-off was underclocking. This was to help applications that would run too fast on newer systems. It’s been a long time since applications ran "too fast" though. These days, we just can’t get enough speed.
