Overclocking the Phenom II at -30°C

[lemonlime]

Running the Phenom II at -30°C (http://icrontic.com/articles/overclocking-the-phenom-ii)

[Buddy J]

Nice job Mike. Do you think you could have gone faster with a different board/BIOS, or is it just the chip's heat that's maxing out the OC?

[Thrax]

Heat is certainly a part of the equation if the LS' evap head is approaching -30C. I also think it's an architectural limitation which is often characterized by excessive voltage requirements for insignificant gains.

[fatcat]

Nice article Mike. Yea seeing a PhenomII at 6.3GHz on Liquid Helium @ -240C was a sight.

[Komete]

Good work. When you ran some benchmarks, how did they scale? ANy noticiple difference between 3.8ghz and 4.4?

Also I know hyper transport didn't have much of an effect on overclocking but did cutting it diminish performance? I'm curios to know, when overclocking the phenom 2's what is the goal to get the most out of the chip.

[lemonlime]

Thanks, all. I didn't have a chance to run any benchmarks as my Windows install was borked along the way and I had to reformat and reinstall. I've still got the rig assembled as pictured, so I'll see if I can run a few quick benchmarks to check for scaling :)

[Buddy J]

Benchmarks plz!

[zeo 1]

pretty nice indeed I've been a fan of amd since the start hell one of my first stand alone pcs was an amd back in the days of slot kit :D

[Mike L.]

So, not to Bash On you guys running the OC, But.....i have to say you guys did not try hard enough/ Or got a bad chip. I myself have a phenom II 940, currently on a simple H2O setup i have a 24\7 stable of of 4009Mhz 1.5Vcore and a suicide run of 4.4 1.55Vcore (boots up but BSOD as soon as i try prime95)

i think if you guys got another chip/ or tried again with the Phase you could get a stable 4.5 at a 1.6Vcore

[lemonlime]

Thanks for the comments, Mike L. I agree that our chip is probably not the greatest. Your result on water is significantly better than we saw on above ambient cooling (I only managed 3.8GHz at 1.55V). I spent quite a few hours with the rig, so I'm pretty confident that I didn't miss anything. It was really tough to find a 100% Prime95 stable clock speed and had to scale back quite a bit to retain 100% stability. I was able to get some pretty impressive clocks without worrying about Prime95 stability, but 100% stability painted a very different picture.

Hardware Canucks did a good Phenom II overclocking writeup (http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/13562-hardware-canucks-benchmarkers-guide-phenom-ii-7.html)as well and saw similar results on phase. Their highest CPU-Z validation was about 500MHz higher than their 100% stable 3DMark Vantage benchmark.

[Buddy J]

Mike L, welcome to Icrontic. What board are you running to hit that OC? ASUS? I'm grasping at straws ...

[Thrax]

If those are your scores, we definitely got a bum chip. Them's the breaks, I suppose. I'd be really interested in seeing pictures of your setup and CPU-Z! :)

[Komete]

What OS were you using? I'm reading some very interesting things about vista64 bit getting less of a top end overclock than 32bit xp. I'm wondering if it extends to all the 64bit os's.

[lemonlime]

For this particular test, I was just using 32bit Windows XP. I've heard that too.. Vista 64 is a little more finiky about system stability.