Efficiency: Optimizing The Clock Rate Of AMD's Phenom II X6

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AMD’s six-core CPU is affordable (at least, compared to Intel's Core i7-980X). We're overclocking the Thuban design to see if its efficiency improves from faster clock rates. Comparisons to other quad- and hexa-core processors provide some perspective.

Test Setup And Overclocking Table

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
Performance Benchmarks
Motherboard (Socket AM3) Asus Crosshair IV Formula (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: AMD 890FX, BIOS: 0505 (04/02/2010)
Motherboard (LGA 1366) Intel DX58SO (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: Intel X58, BIOS: 5000 (02/16/2010)
Motherboard (LGA 1156) Gigabyte P55A-UD7 (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: P55, BIOS: F4
CPU AMD I AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 6 x 512KB L2 and 6MB L3 Cache, TDP 125W, Rev. C3)
CPU AMD II AMD Phenom II X4 965 (45 nm, 3.4 GHz, 4 x 512KB L2 and 6MB L3 Cache, TDP 125W, Rev. C3)
CPU Intel I Intel Core i7-975 Extreme (45 nm, 3.33 GHz, 4 x 256KB L2 and 8MB L3 Cache, TDP 130W, Rev. D0)
CPU Intel II Intel Core i7-980X Extreme (32 nm, 3.33 GHz, 6 x 256KB L2 and 12MB L3 Cache, TDP 130W)
CPU Intel III Intel Core i5-750 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 4 x 256KB L2 and 8MB L3 Cache, TDP 95W, Rev. B1)
DDR3 Memory 3 x 2GB DDR3-1600 (Corsair TR3X6G-1600C8D 8-8-8-24)
Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 GPU: Cypress (725 MHz), Graphics RAM: 1,024MB GDDR5 (2,000 MT/s), Stream Processors: 1,440
Hard Drive Western Digital VelociRaptor, 300GB (WD3000HLFS) 10,000 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750W
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows Ultimate x64 Updated on 2010-03-03
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Intel Storage Drivers Matrix Storage Drivers Ver. 8.​9.​0.​1023