We Overclock Phenom II to 4.9GHz

As you know, Tom's Hardware organized it's Overdrive overclocking finals in Paris over the weekend, bringing in teams from all over the world. The competitors benched and tweaked Intel's new Core i7 platform and achieved some significant scores and frequencies. But alongside Core i7, wealso had the opportunity to overclock AMD"s new Phenom II. You read that right--the next AMDprocessor that's expected to launch in January '09.

4957 MHz

Although AMD says nearly 6 GHz, we could not get - with the helpof Jmax - "only" 4 957 MHz. Remember however that the processor inquestion, a 940 Phenom X4 BE II, is running at 3 GHz in origin. We usedthe processor on a motherboard based on AMD 790GX (Gigabyte) with DDR2 and a cooling system with liquid nitrogen. At this point, based on what AMD tells us, the processor may have a higher potential, but it has an issue of locking at temperatures below -70 °C. To verify that the processor was stable at 4.9 GHz, we conducted some tests and it completed a SuperPi 1M run in 17,769 sec.

In practice, this new Phenom II in 45 nm seems very capable in terms of overclocking. Juding on what able says and how far we were able to push the processor, we're feeling fairly positive about its potential as a mainstream overclocking CPU. Air cooling should prove some interesting results. Look for some upcoming tests soon.