Brigs Lab's

If you’re wanting to smash benchmark records like they don’t exist, you might want to take a leaf out of Team Finland’s book: take a Phenom II quad-core processor and overclock it to a blistering 6.5GHz and beyond.
As reported over on Engadget yesterday, the team – in conjunction with Pete Hardman and Sami Makinen from AMD – took an honestly-not-special Phenom II quad-core processor and started applying some major cooling before the overclock attempt. Well, I say ‘major cooling’: I mean five hundred litres each of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium.
By pushing the core temperature down to a nippy -232 degrees Celsius – that’s 41.15 Kelvin, or just a handful of degrees above Absolute Zero – the team were able to tweak the processor to run at an FSB of 280MHz and a multiplier of 22.5, giving a whopping 6.3GHz speed across all four cores. This rather impressive feat allowed Team Finland – and AMD, of course – to snatch the world record for benchmarking suite 3DMark 05 with a mind-boggling top score of 45,474.

While the speeds achieved in this particular experiment aren’t really within the reach of your typical gamer – unless your typical gamer works for CERN and has access to large quantities of liquid helium – it’s a good indication of just what can be achieved from the new Phenom II chips if you really put your mind to it.

For the “pictures or it didn’t happen” crowd, AMD has uploaded a video of the entire event for your drooling pleasure. Just don’t be tempted to ring around chemical supply shops looking for liquid helium or nitrogen – they have government watchlists for people like that these days…

In a ravenously positive post on Theo Valich’s blog, formerly of Inquirer and TGDaily fame, he claims that AMD has worked specifically with extreme overclockers for the first time in years to achieve a 45nm design that is claimed to work flawlessly from -200C to +100C!

AMD has tweaked the on-die sensor to not lock the part when below zero and AMD techies have apparently worked around cold bugs in the new K10.5 architecture.

Apparently a with a good aircooled heatsink “4.0 GHz is a given on almost every Black Edition CPU that will hit the stores starting January 8, 2009.” Watercooling is then claimed to hit 4.5GHz+ and extreme cooling has hit 6GHz in AMD, claims Theo.

Phenom II will launch as part of the new “Dragon” platform in January, along with the 790GX/FX northbridges and SB750 southbridge that includes the new ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) function. This ACC function is apparently crucial to these overclocking escapades though, effectively making those who own boards with SB600 southbridges or Nvidia chipsets unable to achieve such levels of performance.

We approached Nvidia and asked if future Nvidia MCPs will also feature ACC and it confirmed that it’s not an exclusive AMD technology and Nvidia products will feature it. This will enable better choice for the consumer, rather than the one horse race Intel is currently having.

The advantage Intel has is a higher integrated memory controller clock and faster core-uncore access over AMD. We can only hope AMD improves this internal latency with K10.5.

Finally, if a Phenom II 940 Black Edition (this is AM2+ however) is “40 percent of the amount you have to shell out for Core i7 Extreme 965,” this could be perceived as good value. However, 40 percent of ~£875 = £350, 35 percent more than the very popular Core i7 920 that also hits 4GHz and is just £260. When we consider the platform cost though – AM2+ uses far cheaper DDR2, and AMD motherboards are generally a fraction of the price of the current Intel X58 boards out there, so it could all work out remarkably well balanced. The only final consideration is performance.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites