In mid-September, earlier this year, a team of overclockers sponsored by AMD set a new Guinness Record for clock speed by a silicon processor, setting an AMD FX-8150 processor to run at a staggering 8429.38 MHz. If anything, the coveted Guinness Record feat helped cement the general notion that AMD FX processors are good at overclocking. Sadly, AMD's record didn't last long, with renowned overclocker Andre Yang breaking it with his 8461.51 MHz feat. At this point we don't know if Andre had Guinness covering his feat to he could officially break AMD's record. AMD wouldn't mind it at all, because the new record was set using an AMD FX-8150, too. Andre did it single-handed, or at least he is the only person in the "Submitted by" field on the CPU-Z Validation page.

According to the validation page, 8461.51 MHz was achieved using a base clock speed of 272.95 MHz, with 31.0X multiplier, and a brutal core voltage of 1.992V (almost 2 volts!). As with AMD's record feat, an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard was used. A single 2 GB Corsair-made memory module was used doing 909.8 MHz (1818.16 MHz DDR) with timings of 9-9-9-24T. Like with AMD's feat, only two out of the FX-8150's eight cores were enabled. More details are awaited.

AMD detailed its upcoming "Virgo" PC platform that consists of next-generation "Trinity" APU (accelerated processing unit), and current-generation AMD A75 "Hudson-D" chipset. A notable revelation here is that the next-gen APUs will be compatible with AMD A75, although it will be designed for a new socket called FM2. It remains to be seen if FM1 and FM2 are pin-compatible.

"Trinity" packs four x86-64 cores based on the next-generation "Piledriver" architecture, arranged in two Piledriver modules. A module is a closely-knit group of two cores, with certain shared and dedicated resources. Each Piledriver module has 2 MB of L2 cache shared between the two cores. In all, Trinity, with its two modules, has 4 MB of L2 cache without any L3 cache.

The reviews are now out for AMD's brand new Bulldozer architecture, in the form of the Zambezi FX 8120 & FX 8150 processors and they don't paint a pretty picture of these flagship products. The chips use lots of power, run hot and significantly underperform compared to their Intel competition. On top of that, they are being marketed as 8 core processors, when they are actually 4 core with an advanced form of multi-threading, due to the siamesed nature of each dual processor module. Perhaps to counter this negative publicity and try to restore some faith in the AMD brand, they have released a roadmap for the planned improvements to the architecture, all the way to 2014 - an ambitious timeline, given how much and how unexpectedly things can change at the cutting edge of the technology world.

Well, this is good news for PC enthusiasts. PC overclocking has become a competitive sport in recent years with various brands hosting the competitions and others also chipping in with sponsorship money. This year's event was the fourth annual MSI Master Overclocking Arena competition held in Taipei, Taiwan, with sponsorship money coming from the likes of Intel and Kingston among others. Basic competition info: sixteen teams worldwide; benchmarks used were Super PI 32M, 3DMark 11 and surprisingly, the ancient 3DMark 2001SE but it's not clear why such an old benchmark is being used; the components used are given to contestants based on a lottery system, the team picking a number corresponding to either a CPU or a complete rig. This prevents contestants from having an unfair advantage by bringing in their own heavily modified kit to press home an advantage. Imagine how much more potent a modded motherboard with beefed up voltage regulators could be? Turned out that the favourites, previous winners Romania, won the competition. The prize money was only $3000, which is paltry compared to mainstream sports, but remember that this overclocking "sport" is still very new and is very niche in nature, so isn't so unreasonable when viewed in that light. Head on over to VR-Zone for more competition details and photos.

The EVGA GTX 580 Classified 3072MB, previously announced on TechPowerUp, is now available to buy according to this forum post by an EVGA product manager - in limited quantities, of course. According to Gaming Blend, this card can amazingly reach a doubled 1.6GHz core clock when overclocked using waterblocks - GTX 590 eat your heart out! This card also has custom designed VRMs to take all the extra power that the card will use, which means that they won't squeal when the card is overclocked hard and also when running intensive applications such as Folding@Home.
UPDATE: Turns out that 1.6GHz overclock was actually achieved using LN2, not water. To confirm it, click the EVGA promo link after the jump and see the extreme cooling section video, or just skip directly to the YouTube video here.

We know how chip manufacturers aren't usually very keen on overclocking of their products, but here, Intel explains the actual steps to take in achieving a great overclock! And oddly enough, this includes their locked CPUs as well, which raises the question of why lock them at all? Bit-tech looked into overclocking the new LGA2011 Sandy Bridge E in detail.Intel highlights the key areas for overclocking Sandy Bridge E processors, and gives a practical example of a 4.74 GHz overclock

AMD's Bulldozer 8.4 GHz+ OC Achievement: Cooled to Near-Absolute Zero

TechPowerUp recently brought you news on AMDs fantastic overclocking achievement with their new processors. Now we can tell you how it was done: cherry-picking the chips and slapping on some water cooling isn't quite enough. AMDs new processors can operate at much lower temperatures without displaying the "cold bug" - where it just gives up and goes home - and performance scales very well at super-low temperatures. The problem is that the cold affects lots of things such as timing, but more importantly, power circuits, which stop switching and just fry everything in sight - surely one to avoid. AMD senior manager of social media, Simon Solotko explains in detail how it was all done, using both liquid helium and liquid nitrogen to make the poor processor really cold. The new processor had these great qualities, according to Solotko:

It was able to take a lot of voltage, extremely low temperatures, extremely high frequencies," he said. "It was very durable under extreme overclocking. So that was awesome. So it worked well, it scaled well, it responded to cold well - all the right variables.

This overclock is an impressive feat and it will be interesting to see if Intel can match it.