AMD's Bulldozer architecture is a well-known quantity by now, and seemingly straddles a line between loathing and love between tech enthusiasts. Slow and power hungry compared to Intel's options, it harkens back to a time where the roles were reversed, and AMD were looking to compensate for architectural deficiencies (and architectural design decisions that can either be claimed as erroneous or ahead of their time) via increased clockspeeds. However you look at these Bulldozer CPUs, the fact is that they remain some of the best overclockers of all time - at least when it comes to maximum operating frequencies, especially at absolutely scorching vCore values.

To achieve that operating frequency, Der8auer used an Elmor EVC2 controller and diagnostics chip, which, connected to a usually unpopulated pin area in the ASUS 970 PRO GAMING/AURA motherboard, allowed him to read-out everything that was running through the motherboard's VRM circuitry, and perform manual adjustments. Corsair Vengeance 2,666 MHz DDR3 memory was also used in the system. An accident happened along the way, though: when pulling AMD's stock cooler from the motherboard, the CPU remained attached to the cooler, which resulted in some bent pins (screams in horror). Luckily, things were fixed with a screwdriver - let that serve as a warning, alert, and tip, should this happen to you.Anyway, the AMD FX-8350 achieved an 8,127 MHz speed with a 1,920 vCore, which is an absolutely incredible voltage for a 32 nm CPU. Running at 7,500 MHz for a single-core performance benchmark, the CPU was pulling 100 W of power - for a single core to operate at that speed, mind you. Even so, the AMD FX-8350 only achieved a single-core score of 172 points - for comparison sake, AMD's six-core Ryzen 5 2600X, running at stock clocks of 3.6 GHz with all cores enabled, achieves 176 points in the same benchmark. Watch the video below for the full rundown on this experiment.