Earlier this month, the guys at Vortez were able to get a preview of AMD’s upcoming FX CPUs and their incredible overclocking potential.
Early this month, AMD sent us an invite to a preview of their new FX CPU products and we here at Vortez jumped at the opportunity. AMD’s new CPU lineup is not far away and AMD were keen to show us what it was all about before launch. Almost all the information regarding performance, price and so on is still under NDA, but today we have a quick preview of the overclocking potential of the Bulldozer-based chips.
AMD’s Sami Mäkinen starts to cool things down
You also may have read today that AMD has broken the Guinness World Record for overclocking by pushing their new AMD FX-8150 to a staggering 8.429.4 GHz with the help of liquid nitrogen and finally, liquid helium. This cools the processor to around -225 degrees Celsius, which would introduce cold bugs for many older CPU architectures. Clearly the new architecture is an overclocker’s delight. Go to our news article to read more about the world record. Read on here to share our experience with the new FX CPUs.
Overclocking
After a presentation by Sasa Marinkovic (Head of Desktops and Fusion Software, Product Marketing, AMD) and Bernard Seite (AMD Technical Advisor) we were already excited about the potential of the new AMD FX CPUs but there was more to come. We’d love to share more details about the new architecture with you but we must wait, although we will have all the juicy tidbits when the time comes.
After a successful record attempt in Austin, Texas using liquid helium (temperatures of -220 to -230 degrees Celsius), AMD decided to show us what the AMD FX CPUs are capable of under liquid nitrogen (a less impressive, but still amazingly chilly -185 degrees Celsius!). The expert AMD overclocker, Sami Mäkinen was there to show us exactly how this is accomplished.
Down to a chilly -185 degrees Celsius with the aid of liquid nitrogen
In order to gain the highest clock speed, 6 cores were disabled with 2 active. The bus speed was set to 266 MHz and the CPU multiplier incremented (starting at 6G Hz right off the bat) to x30 (7.98 Ghz) using the AMD PSCheck utility, which was the highest stable multiplier under those conditions. The bus speed was then upped to 267 Mhz and then 268 MHz to find the highest clock.
Things are starting to get interesting!
A mighty impressive overclock was of 8.0369 GHz was accomplished. As we’ve seen, more can be squeezed out with a cherry picked processor and additional cooling, but this kind of performance sets a new benchmark and throws the gauntlet down to future CPUs to go one better. It also tells us that the new FX CPUs should overclock very well and scale brilliantly with additional voltage. The ASUS Crosshair V was used to overclock and a max voltage of 2.0V was used to accomplish the dizzying frequency over two cores.
Broken the 8GHz barrier under LN2.
The event and demonstration was a great taster to whet our (and I hope your) appetites towards the new line of FX processors from AMD, and we’d like to extend our thanks to AMD for inviting us along. I’m thinking it might be time for an upgrade…..
