AMD overclocks 45nm Phenoms to 4GHz and beyond
by Cyril Kowaliski — 1:47 PM on November 20, 2008

According to AMD's latest roadmaps, 45nm Phenom II processors are just a few weeks away from launch—they'll materialize at the Consumer Electronic Show in early January. Not a bad time to start gauging the overclocking potential of these chips, right?

AMD took care of that itself at an event in Austin this morning, where it showcased four overclocked Phenom II systems. TR editor-in-chief Scott Wasson was on the scene, and while AMD didn't allow attendees to take pictures, he jotted down a few details.

The slowest system—cooled with a heatsink and fan—managed to reach just under 4GHz with a 1.55V core voltage. With liquid cooling, AMD successfully pushed a 45nm Phenom II in another machine just over the 4GHz mark. That required kicking up the CPU voltage to 1.6V, however. For the other two systems, AMD took out the big guns. One was strapped to a phase-change cooler and reached the mid-4GHz range at 1.7V, while the fastest system managed to well over 5GHz using liquid nitrogen (which kept the core temperature down to a chilly -185°C).

Considering the latest leaked roadmaps suggest the fastest Phenom II launch CPU will run at 3GHz, those are pretty decent overclocks. We should note that AMD was using Crysis to test stability, however, and that only stresses a couple of cores at best.

haha, all is extreme cooling

The slowest system—cooled with a heatsink and fan—managed to reach just under 4GHz with a 1.55V core voltage. With liquid cooling, AMD successfully pushed a 45nm Phenom II in another machine just over the 4GHz mark. That required kicking up the CPU voltage to 1.6V, however.

the highest clock is the stable clock?

but the vcore kinda high...?

that vcore, compared to E8400, izit high or low?

Hmm..How the Nehalem VCore Compared to it?Wolfdale really cannot compare as it has no IMC/the architechtural not very diff with Deneb.
Last time i saw Core i7 4Ghz around 1.4xVCore right?

I quite literally just got back to the hotel from AMD's Austin campus after a day with some rather interesting information being disclosed and freely discussed.

Unfortunately, the level of free discussion outside of the room is heavily covered by NDA so I'm unable to announce specific details. But this is what I can say...

The new platform from AMD will be called 'Dragon' and will be focused around the new 'Phenom II' processors, 4800-series Radeon graphics cards and 7-series chipset based motherboards.

Here are some general performance observations that I can disclose:

Phenom II and the Dragon platform can overclock to 4GHz on air - we were demonstrated a system @ 3.9GHz using stock bus frequency and HT link frequency and a multiplier set at 19.5x. This was done with 1.55v BIOS set. This system was looping endlessly through a Crysis time demo without issue; by the end of the day it was past 100 loops.

The platform core specifications demonstrated were as follows:

Phenom II processor
GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H motherboard
Radeon HD4870X2 graphics
OCZ Reaper memory

While the unit demonstrated was @ 3.9GHz, we later had a hands on benching period with the new platform and I was able to quite easily reach this stated 4GHz frequency.

This same platform also exceeded 5GHz on liquid nitrogen cooling. But what was perhaps the coolest (no pun intended) specific of this demonstration was the processor operating and even cold booting at -196 degrees Celsius - that's right, AMD has no cold bugs of any kind, at all for Phenom II!

During this LN2 session the system was demonstrated operating in excess of 5GHz and running 1.95v BIOS set (1.936v CPU-Z read in Windows) and as stated, at the maximum lowest temps available with liquid nitrogen - time to find a liquid helium supplier peeps!

I'm gagged by the NDA on any further information and specifications such as model numbers, product features + specs, stock clock frequencies or even specific overclocked frequencies (i.e. LN2 max) as well as pricing, competitive performance or bench scores. So please, don't even bother asking me these questions as I cannot and will not answer these questions - at least until the NDA drops.

What I wanted to do with this post is at least let you all know that there is hope still for AMD and that while I've harped on about the LN2 experience, the overclocking ability is solid for LN2, phase, water and air cooling methods.