AMD Phenom hits 7GHz
The team took an AMD Phenom II X4 975 processor and got it running at over 7GHz, thanks to liquid nitrogen.
The quad-core chip, which ordinarily runs at a frequency of 3.6GHz with an 18x clock multiplier, was pushed to an overall speed of 7.134GHz by using a HTT frequency of 226.49MHz and a CPU multiplier 31.5x - an impressive feat.
The team, from the XtremeSystems Forums, used an Asus Crosshair IV motherboard featuring an AMD 890FX chipset and a seriously powerful liquid nitrogen-based cooling system to achieve their overclock, which proved slightly unstable during extended benchmarking. A change to a bus frequency of 220.4MHz, however, netted a rock-solid 6.944GHz overclock.
The world-record attempt wasn't without its casualties, however: a modified Nvidia GTX 580 1.5GB shorted out during the overclocking and was consigned to scrap, replaced for the official attempt by an apparently more durable - although significantly slower - ATI Radeon HD 4890 card.
It's an impressive feat, and a considerable win for the team behind it - but says little about the Deneb-based processor under general usage. Overclocking contests that use liquid nitrogen for a coolant are impressive and result in very high figures, but are somewhat impractical for day-to-day use compared to an air- or water-based cooling system.
Are you impressed that the team were able to get the AMD Phenom II to over 7GHz, or just saddened that an Nvidia GTX 580 had to sacrifice its life in the attempt? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyImpressive overclock but obviously no chance of us getting speeds like that at home!
And before anyone says anything Its a Modified 580.
Pshhh, what are you talking about I run Crysis at those clocks on a regular basis! No problem there duuddeeee
Ha genius! Love it.
I'm running that too at the moment - only getting 43 fps at the moment. How much are you getting
i7 3.8 ht off last time testing (test with it back on see if any stuttering still the game does support muticore and ht as well)
(315 *602) = 1134000 m/h
1134000 / 1000 = 1134 km/h
(1134 / 8) * 5 = 708.75 MPH
roughly as conversion to mph isn't exact.
Not that there is any scientific basis for the above i just made it up.
It's so powerful that it makes units of distance become units of time.
Or... 'AMD Phenom hits 7,1GHz, although slightly unstable '
But I guess that might depend on which side of the fence you sit on ;-)
Intel's chips no longer have high clock speed ceilings, mainly due to their architecture. Intel learned its lesson with Netburst (which I believe they predicted would scale to 12ghz, and was therefore designed with low ipc but high clock speed in mind), whereas i7 and core based chips simply can't handle those speeds.
However, considering the current state of affairs, it's reasonable to presume that an i7 would not need to reach as high a speed to be competitive in terms of performance, so in reality it works itself out.
That's better than most of the women I've dated. Too bad it has a heard of LN2.
At any rate the importance of the Phenom II is at the end of the line. Bulldozer will determine the future. If Bulldozer overclocks to 5GHz on air and has a similar IPC to the i5/i7 then AMD will be back in the game.
I've been running stable at 4 GHz on air coolers (with 965 and 970), so indeed I don't know why you haven't heard of 4 GHz on water..
Back to the topic: I hate when they run these records on processors that aren't even launched yet. For all I know there won't be AMD-launches this year, so they are atleast a month too early with the 975...
LN2 cooling is as useful as snooze button on a smoke alarm.
I still don't get it why some people are so excited about few random numbers, when such "achievement" is purely academical and doomed to failure after test is over.
It is a testament to the architecture that it could actually scale to this speeds - though both impractical and in reality, not very useful. If AMD pull some insane IPC improvements out with Bulldozer (which, lets face it, they should be since its nearly 3 years overdue), and maintains this same level of clock speed scaling, we may actually have a few reasons to pick up an amd processor next year - other than the price, of course.