Friday, December 5th 2008
Phenom II at 6+ GHz: How AMD May Have Done It
A couple of weeks ago, at the AMD Austin Tech Day event, the company stunned the computer enthusiast community, by presenting to the press, the overclocking capabilities of the upcoming Phenom II X4 processor. The enginners managed to boot the machine at CPU speeds in excess of 6 GHz, 6.213 GHz to be precise. A close-up snap of a portion of the CPU-Z window showing the overclock, made its way to AMD's own photostream at Flickr, among other pictures related to the event.
The picture reveals the clock speed at 6213.6 MHz, bus speed at 200 MHz, FSB multiplier at an unreal 31.0x and resulting HyperTransport link speed at 1002.2 MHz. This would mean that they may have dropped down the HT link multiplier (normally 200 x 10.0 for the Phenom II X4 940) to 5x. We already know from previous reports that the vCore was set around 1.90 Volts, and that a copper pot with liquid nitrogen was used to cool the chip. The motherboard used, from the pictures, appears to be Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H, which is based on the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipset. For more pictures, browse through the photostream. More pictures could be added to the stream once the NDA lifts on December 14.
The picture reveals the clock speed at 6213.6 MHz, bus speed at 200 MHz, FSB multiplier at an unreal 31.0x and resulting HyperTransport link speed at 1002.2 MHz. This would mean that they may have dropped down the HT link multiplier (normally 200 x 10.0 for the Phenom II X4 940) to 5x. We already know from previous reports that the vCore was set around 1.90 Volts, and that a copper pot with liquid nitrogen was used to cool the chip. The motherboard used, from the pictures, appears to be Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H, which is based on the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipset. For more pictures, browse through the photostream. More pictures could be added to the stream once the NDA lifts on December 14.
88 Comments on Phenom II at 6+ GHz: How AMD May Have Done It
Though this high speed doesn't have, yet, a CPU-ID validation, this other one, @ 4.4GHz does:
valid.canardpc.com/records.php
Check the AMD K10 CPU frequency record.
enthusiast will love this cpu.. Will wait 4 AM3 cpu..
If they managed to get that pic of CPU-Z, they entered windows and, even if it wasn't stable @ that speed, just reducing it to say ... 5.5 GHz should have given it enough stability to do so, no?
Just because it reaches 6 GHz, doesn't mean that it will perform as good as i7 @ 6 GHz: i need to see some benches of that before i draw any conclusions.
I'm definitely looking forward to freezing one of these :)
I only game no benchies for me.:)
This is great news for us? Rock on AMD this should give Intel a run for their money, hopefully force them to cut their prices and not gouge us... Yea for free market!!! :toast:
6GHz, wow, looks like Intel won't be too happy if Phenom II gets the performance crown for next year.
6Ghz. WOW. Impressive.
BUT, TBH, I really dont know what all the fuss is over Liquid Nitrogen cooled, multipler hacked, one-minute-only computing.
I can get an old Ford pickup, stick an aviation rocket engine in the back, and pull a hell of a stunt... for about 10 seconds before the thing disintegrates.
REAL WORLD computing performance is what wins in my books. Anything else is teenage wet fantasy.
And until AMD can get a CPU on air (or water) in a normal case to beat an i7 on air (or water) in a normal case, then Intel remains The King.