Overclocking
We’re always interested to see if new processors might be better overclocking candidates than the older versions, and to that end we’re pushing the Phenom II X6 1100T to the limit. Unfortunately the result isn’t especially encouraging, with a 4 GHz final result using a 20x CPU multiplier combined with BIOS settings of 1.5 V for the CPU and 1.4 V for the CPU northbridge. The memory managed to hold at 536 MHz with low 7-7-7-16-27 timings.
This is the same CPU overclock we achieved with our Phenom II X6 1090T in a previous overclocking article, so while it's a respectable result for a Phenom II X6, we’re not particularly impressed with the potential of our new sample. Here are the test results:
The overclocked Phenom II X6 1100T manages to push its way past the stock Core i7-920 here, but the overclocked 3.75 GHz Core i5-750 pulls a much higher Dhrystone result and shows why Intel is such a formidable opponent in the overclocking arena (gotta respect the manufacturing technology advantage there). Nevertheless, the overclocked Phenom II X6 1100T manages to achieve a much higher Whetstone score than the overclocked Core i5-750.
The DivX codec shows a large performance increase with the Phenom II X6’s hexa-core architecture, but the Xvid codec prefers raw speed and Intel’s processor architecture. The overclocked Phenom II X6 1100T beats all of the stock processors here, but the overclocked Core i5-750 scores a clear win when it comes to Xvid encoding. Note that the overclocked 3.75 GHz Phenom II X6 1075T performs just as fast as the 4.0 GHz Phenom II X6 1100T in this test, probably because of the 1075T's overclocked 250 MHz bus speed compared to the 1100T's standard 200 MHz bus.
As we said previously, our StarCraft 2 benchmark is CPU-limited. The game does respond very well to Intel Core i5 overclocking, but the Phenom II CPUs don’t show much of a performance increase when pushed to 4 GHz.
