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Overclocking – AMD OverDrive not yet Mature

01:20 - Wednesday 23 January 2008 by Bert Toepelt
Source: Tom's Hardware UK – Keywords: phenom, 9600, black, edition
Categories: Hardware

Table of content:
7 – Overclocking – AMD OverDrive n...
  1. 1 – AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition
  2. 2 – B2 Stepping – TLB Bug is Still Around
  3. 3 – B2 Stepping – TLB Bug is Still Around (Cont'd)
  4. 4 – Phenom 9600 Black Edition
  5. 5 – Overclocking – AMD’s OverDrive Badly Supported
  6. 6 – Overclocking – Newer Versions from other Sources?
  7. 7 – Overclocking – AMD OverDrive not yet Mature
  8. 8 – Overclocking – AMD OverDrive not yet Mature (Cont’d.)
  9. 9 – Overlocking by 13.04% - 2.60 GHz
  10. 10 – Overclocking – Hitting the Limit at 2.70 GHz
  11. 11 – Overclocking – Hitting the Limit at 2.70 GHz (Cont’d.)
  12. 12 – Only 12.5% more Performance
  13. 13 – Slower than Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600
  14. 14 – Power Consumption – 21 Watts when Idle
  15. 15 – Power Consumption – 150 Watts when Overclocked
  16. 16 – Test Setup
  17. 17 – Software Configuration
  18. 18 – Benchmarks and Settings
  19. 19 – 3D-Games - UT2004, Prey
  20. 20 – 3D-Games - Quake 4, Warhammer
  21. 21 – 3D-Games -Supreme Commander, Serious Sam 2
  22. 22 – 3D-Rendering - Cinema 4D, 3D-Studio Max
  23. 23 – Applications - AVG, WinRAR
  24. 24 – Applications - Photoshop, PDF
  25. 25 – Applications - Deep Fritz
  26. 26 – Audio Encoding - iTunes, Lame
  27. 27 – Synthetic - Sandra CPU
  28. 28 – Synthetic - Sandra Memory
  29. 29 – Synthetic - Sandra Multimedia
  30. 30 – Synthetic - PC-Mark
  31. 31 – Synthetic - 3DMark06
  32. 32 – Video Encoding - Xvid, Pinnacle Studio
  33. 33 – Video Encoding - Premiere, Mainconcept
  34. 34 – Video Encoding - HDTV, DivX
  35. 35 – Video Encoding - CloneDVD
  36. 36 – Conclusion – AMD’s Phenom 9600 can’t Beat Intel’s Q6600

Overclocking – AMD OverDrive not yet Mature

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Theoretically, one would expect that software written by AMD specifically for the Phenom processor should work without any problems. However, during testing we realized that the OverDrive utility is not yet technically mature and is still plagued by many problems.

In some cases, a version offered directly by the motherboard manufacturer for a certain motherboard caused the system to crash as soon as we attempted to overclock it. In the case of our MSI board, the utility gave us an error message telling us it had failed to find an AMD processor in the system.

Let us describe to you a scenario we encountered that is a perfect example of why AMD OverDrive is not yet suitable for overclocking. First you have to choose the menu entry “Advanced mode” from within the “Preference” submenu in order to enable the feature that lets you change the multiplier. The tool will respond by displaying a warning that your system may become unstable if you change any settings.


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Talkback
mi1ez 23/01/2008 03:09
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mi1ez

Oh dear...
This has certainly done them no more favours...

Therlian 23/01/2008 03:31
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Therlian

This is an embarrassment for AMD. It's actually worse that they released the Black Edition of this processor because it shows that even with all the tricks, AMD is currently not even posing as competition for Intel. I don't know what AMD will be able to do to keep going; it seems like no matter what they try they are still way behind Intel.

At least when Intel was beating AMD in performance in the early days of the P2, at least AMD was still a viable option because of their price/performance ratio.

I hope they come up with something though; I don't want Intel to be the only product and raise their prices.

darthpoik 24/01/2008 11:40
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darthpoik

Poor AMD. I liked you a lot but Intel are truly kicking your butts. Hopefully this is just a Rocky feint and they will be back with a vengence soon

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