|
Overclocking
It's been a while since
we've had the pleasure of overclocking AMD CPU's. The experience
is quite different than Intel. I had to research all of the
settings to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid. The basics
are still the same, but squeezing the most out of your CPU and
motherboard requires intimate knowledge of your components.
Fortunately, there are tons of great places and great people to answer
all of your questions. We were able to take our 9950 from stock
settings to 3.0Ghz at a very modest CPU voltage of 1.375v. I was
able to load windows at 3.4GHz at 1.41v but couldn't get all of my
benchmarks to run. If you want to press your luck, I'm sure that
with a little more tweaking and a little more voltage, 3.4GHz would be stable.
Testing
For testing we are going to
run the Sapphire PURE 790FX through a gamut of benchmarks, from synthetic to
gaming. I'll show each benchmark as completely default and as overclocked. Settings for each benchmark will be listed. Test system is as follows.
| Motherboard |
Sapphire
PURE CrossfireX 790FX VOIP Edition |
| CPU |
Phenom X4 9950
Black Edition |
| Video |
2 -
Visiontek HD4750
512MB Crossfire |
| Memory |
2GB Corsair
Dominator XMS2-9136 |
| Power Supply |
Epowetec 1200w |
| Storage |
2 x 400GB Seagate HDD
RAID 0 |
| Optical |
Lite-On 20X DVD+/-RW +DL |
| OS |
Windows Vista Ultimate |
Sisoft
Sandra
|
Memory |
|
800MHz CAS 5-5-5-15 |
INT buff'd |
9338
MB/s |
| Float buff'd |
6811 MB/s |
|
1066MHz CAS 5-5-5-15 |
INT buff'd |
9812 MB/s |
| Float buff'd |
9811 MB/s |
Cinebench 10
|
CineBench 10 |
| Default Clocks
(2.6GHz) |
Single CPU |
2119 CB-CPU |
| Dual CPU |
8262 CB-CPU |
| OpenGL |
4463 CB-GFX |
| Overclocked (3.0GHz) |
Single CPU |
2404 CB-CPU |
| Dual CPU |
9383 CB-CPU |
| OpenGL |
4728 CB-GFX |
|
