Phenom II X4 was launched just a week ago and when AMD showed off its new processor at CES it had a complete focus on the extreme overclocking potential of the processor. It made the first overclocking display together a couple of weeks ago, most likely being inspired by the guys of what used to be ATI and reach over 6GHz with AMD’s then soon to be launched 45nm processor. Now that AMD has started to get the new process in order and that the quality of the processors are good was shown with the utmost clarity by a trio of fins in Las Vegas.
Sami ”macci” Mäkinen, Petri ”SF3D” Korhonen and Sampsa Kurri got to do do whatever they wanted with Phenom II X4, a processor that had already been pushed over 6GHz at several occasions and the results was not far off.
Sami ”macci” Mäkinen, Petri ”SF3D” Korhonen and Sampsa Kurri
During the live showcase they managed to push Phenom II X4 (retail) to 6301MHz and together with two Radeon HD 4870 X2 it resulted in a new 3DMark05 world record, 45,474 points;
The key to the enormous potential of Phenom II is that it doesn’t seem to suffer from any kind of coldbugs at all. Coldbug are usually what stops overclockers from cooling a chip to low enough temperatures and when you go to low on the Celsius scale the CPU collapses and the system hangs. Core i7 seems to be hitting the coldbug at around -120°C to -140°C.
This is nothing compared to Phenom II X4 that can be cooled with liquid helium to close to unimaginable -242°C, that’s not far from making the atoms come to a complete stop. Liquid nitrogen is usually what extreme overclockers use to overclock, but you can’t go lower than -195 C with LN2, in other words not enough for AMD’s latest processor which was overvolted from 1.3V to 1.86V.
The voltage appetite of Phenom II X4 is also partly the reason why don’t see the same extreme overclocking results with air and water cooling, where Core i7 is still on par in terms of frequency.
The system they used looked as follows;
Processor: Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (280×22.5, 8x HT multiplier)
Motherboard: DFI LANParty Dark 790FXB-M2RS
Memory: OCZ DDR2-1066
Graphics cards: 2 x ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 (800MHz Core / 950MHz memory)
