Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Phenom II Breaks 6.5GHz, Enables New 3DMark Record

Using a liquid helium cooling solution

Prior to the official release of AMD's next-generation 45nm Phenom II processors, the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker held a number of events where it approached the opportunity of demonstrating the overclocking potential of its latest desktop processors. Soon after their official release at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, the processors were used in yet another demonstration, where one of AMD's Phenom II products was pushed to record clock levels and was used to break the Futuremark 3DMark05 record.

While such an event is probably of little or no importance to the regular computer user, the achievement is nevertheless impressive as it requires a strong knowledge base of overclocking and some pretty impressive tools. Basically, an event such as the one that was held after CES earlier this month is of interest to those technology enthusiasts that take pleasure in pushing technology to its limits. The overclocking team, however, claims that the occasion was also meant to provide details on the performance levels achieved when employing alternative cooling methods, such as liquid helium.

The result of 45474 Marks in 3DMark05 is still standing, and you can see it for yourself at this page. There's also a YouTube video of the event (which is embedded at the end of this article), explaining the procedures required to record the impressive result. As you will notice in the video, the overclocking team managed to take the Phenom II processor to an impressive 6.5GHz, which permitted it to set a world record for the x86 quad-core processor. Initially, the core speed was set to 6.3GHz, which enabled a 3DMark05 score slightly below the 45000 mark.

AMD had been emphasizing the performance results of its Phenom II processors for a great amount of time ahead of their official release, but the simple fact is that these desktop chips haven't been successful in allowing AMD to reclaim the highest-performance CPU title, currently held by Intel's Core i7.