Posts tagged with AM3
Overclocking 101 with the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 9:05 PM
(20 votes, average: 4.10 out of 5)
Loading ...Breaking it down with Pete Hardman in our secret lab
Does your PC have overclock potential? Our new AMD PhenomTM II processors certainly do, and to showcase this I ventured over to our super secret lab buried deep inside the bowels of our Austin campus to prove the point!
Picture long hallways of unmarked doors, the hum of machinery, people milling about eyeing you up and down, wondering who you are and why you’re there. Now imagine a dream job for an enthusiast, one where you have almost limitless access to silicon, hardware and time to hone your craft. This is the life of Pete Hardman, one of AMD’s in-house overclocking gurus!
Pete comes into work every day, passes through the “MI6″ type security barriers, enters his lab and proceeds to break records the world may never ever know about (at least that’s what he tells us)! All in a day’s work I say!
You may have seen some of the insane things we’ve done with Dragon platform technology and liquid helium, both at CES and with our friends in Finland. But for this blog we’re going to keep it simple and break down a ‘tried and true’ method for getting more performance out of your AMD Phenom II processor.
Check out his classy nameplate
Pete's work desk - a little unorthodox to say the least
Pete and I took the new AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor and walked it through a proper overclocking methodology using AMD OverDriveTM software*. Here are the steps we went through in detail:
Overclocking 101
Step 1 – Figure out your goals, small increase or one shot big gain? Power efficiency, is it important? Going for a full system max overclcok? Find the limits?
Step 2 – Procure the right hardware and software.
Our test system:
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition quad-core processor
ASUS M4879T Deluxe DDR3 Motherboard
4G Corsair DDR3 Memory
ATI RadeonTM HD4870 X2 GPU
Thermalrite Ultra 120 Extreme “TRUE”
2 – 120mm high volume fans
Software add-ons:
Step 3 – Prep system – thermal paste the CPU, mount your air cooling solution as per guidelines. Keep the thermal paste to a nice thin amount; this will be beneficial once the heatsink is applied and pressure is added.
Step 4 – Power on system and boot to the OS – Install AMD OverDrive software*
Step 5 – Change frequency; make small incremental changes to the systems multiplier.
Once you have made your frequency multiplier changes, run a benchmark like Cinebench or 3DMark® to check for stability. Adjust frequency using stock voltage first before increasing voltage.
Step 6 – Increase multiplier and redo step 5 until the benchmark does not complete.
Step 7 – Once you have established the ‘ceiling’ in terms of frequency at stock voltage, do a cold reset/reboot.
Step 8 – Now increase voltage; this should also be done incrementally. You need to know how the voltage scales with frequency. As you increase voltage, frequency should increase, but there is a limit where too much voltage will start to reduce frequency; this is the “Sweet Spot” – find it!
Step 9 – Make a small 50mv increase, now retry the benchmark at the same frequency you previously failed at.
Step 10 – Continue to increase frequency at the new voltage until you find a fail case (meaning your computer hangs or blue screens).
Step 11 – Once you have a fail case at the new frequency, increase the voltage another 50mv and redo Step 10
Step 12 – Once you have established a threshold on voltage and frequency, we now move to the Northbridge and we make those changes via BIOS
Step 13 – Restart and enter BIOS
Step 14 – Click on CPU/NB Frequency and make an increase; we went from 2G to 2.4G which is a large jump and ended up at 2.8Ghz.
Step 15 – Continue to make incremental increases until you have a fail.
Step 16 – Take the results from steps 5, 8 and 12 and put them all together into a total system overclock. CPU cores, Voltage and North Bridge frequency all overclocked to establish a high performing PC experience
Overclocking can be a lot of fun; I personally like to do a moderate overclock and leave my system at that performance level. Pete, on the other hand, is pushing the boundaries of silicon every day. Chances are you are wondering what frequency we ended at, well, the results may vary, and what Pete and I achieved may not be representative of what everyone can do. With that caveat clearly stated, our final frequency was 4.2G on air without overclocking the memory. Not bad considering we did not spend a lot of time tweaking, we simply followed the steps above that delivered a good 1 Ghz OC.
*And remember kids, AMD’s product warranty does not cover damage caused by overclocking, even when enabled via AMD OverDriveTM software.
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
An Enthusiasts Dream Machine
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 3:29 PM
Simply blissful gaming!
Twist my arm, unreleased GPU meets, unreleased CPU meets unreleased Microsoft OS! When I was asked to build out a totally “unreleased product” PC and experience/blog on the tremendous gaming capabilities of such a system, I was all over it!
First things first, collect all the necessary components; as you can imagine this is a very easy task at AMD.
Components – CHECK
Chassis – Antec Skeleton (as this is easy to do quick uninstalls and reinstalls)
Birthplace – yes, we are human, even though we work and live in grey cubes
Lifting the veil!
Motherboard – Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (AM3)
Memory – 8G Corsair XMS3 DHX DDR3 1333
CPU – Unreleased AMD Phenom™ II Quad Core (3.2Ghz)
GPU – ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 OC (unreleased at the time, available today)
OS – A super secret version of Windows 7
CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 quad core running at a stock frequency of 3.2Ghz, this CPU is scheduled to be available sometime in Q2.
The GPU is a third generation DirectX10.1 graphics card that is powered by the most powerful gaming GPU under $2601.. Availability of this GPU is April 2nd worldwide (today) and I was excited to test it early!
Some of the specs to the GPU are:
Compute Power – 1.36 TFLOPS
Core Clock Speed – 900 Mhz
Memory – GDDR5
Frame Buffer – 1G
Memory Bandwidth – 124.8 GB/s
Transistors – 959 million
Stream Processors – 800
On to the gaming experience.
Home office and test area – Yes, that is Tweetdeck open, yes that is an HP dv2 on the left and yes that is an Optimun Prime helmet beside my Master Chief helmet! Me=Geek
Just for clarity, I installed a really mature version of Windows 7 as the OS to go with the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 software driver that we just released. This excluded me from using AMD Overdrive™ for overclocking2 or Fusion Gaming Utility3 as I did not have time to fully test these apps on Win7 (rest assured we’ll get to those in other blogs). Not to mention, I really wanted to give you a sense of the coolest gaming PC build possible!!!
If you have read any of my previous posts, you will quickly come to realize that I love Call of Duty 4: World at War, Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.2. These were my games of choice. As you can clearly see above, I hooked them up to one of my 30” DELL monitors and cranked all the game settings to the max. It was simply beautiful, truly cinematic HD gaming.
L4D, killing zombies on a 22” screen is boring, killing zombies while rendering with an HD4890 on a 30” screen was scary!! I have never been so stressed out while gaming (minus my first time playing DOOM).
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
F.E.A.R. 2, can’t say I’m tired of playing the first few levels of this game, especially on such a massive screen with so much horsepower!Between the CPU and GPU, F.E.A.R 2 purred along at 2560×1600 without a hitch, flicker or anomaly! It was the way the game was meant to be played! (no pun intended here)
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
The experience of CoD4 WaW was awe-inspiring! Nothing like running into a fox hole – gun a’blazin’ (or in this case, flame thrower a’flamin’) without the distraction of load times or annoying interruptions from hitches and flickers!
Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!
If you are a hard core gamer looking for the best GPU value in the market – and when I say value I do not mean cheap or thrifty, I mean hardnosed best product for the money – the ATI Radeon HD 4890 needs to be a consideration! Market leading performance, exceptional price AND actual availability on launch day! No PR gimmicks here folks, no paper launches, no “ball and cup” games, just innovative product, with industry leading features built by gamers for gamers!
Don’t take my word for it; here are some very reputable 3rd party review sites to verify my experience!
“Editor’s choice Enthusiast Gold Award”
Mark Warner, Brent Justice, HardOCP
“Bon” Award (performance 4/5, features 4/5)
“It is hardly known if the GTX 275 will be available in volume or at the price promised”
Clubic.com (France)
“It is not a completely new design, but the Radeon HD 4890 is an exciting product nonetheless. To put it simply, the Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest, single-GPU powered graphics card AMD has ever produced. And its competitive pricing and overclocking headroom should further its appeal amongst enthusiasts.”
“HotHardware Recommended Award”
Marco Chiappetta, HotHardware.com
Now, I need to get back to gaming on this beautiful piece of engineering…until next blog!
(BTW: I respond to most all comments personally, catch me here or on Twitter)
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
1 Internal calculations show that the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers 1.36 TFLOPs of raw compute power. Third-party testing shows that the fastest competing GPU, the GeForce GTX 280 graphics processor, delivers 1.06 TFLOPs of raw compute power. http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-GTX-285-card-605.html.
2 AMD product warranty does not cover damage caused by performance tuning, even when enabled using AMD software.
3 THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
The PC Enthusiast’s $145 “Tri-fecta”…
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 4:34 AM
Test driving the new AM3-compatible AMD Phenom™ II Triple-core Processor One of the perks of my job is I get to use PC hardware long before it’s ever launched (yes I know, some might be jealous of such a perk). With the launch of our AM3 parts, it was no exception. One of our faithful PR spinners dropped off a triplecore, specifically the AMD Phenom™ II X3 720 Black Edition (2.8GHz) to my desk, the idea was that I would build a system from scratch and then write a blog on the experience. Being a team player and loving the idea of a whole day in thermal grease up to my elbows, I had to accept the task…here we go: The system I chose to build was:
- AMD Phenom™ II X3 720 Black Edition (2.8GHz)
- Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H (AMD 790GX-based mobo)
- ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 (single card without ATI CrossFireX™ technology enabled)
- 4G Corsair Memory DDR2
- 150G WD HDD
- Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit
The test system
WEI and 3DMark System Specs
After the install and boot up was complete, I did what ALL gamers should do (on a monthly basis) and updated my ATI CatalystTM GPU software drivers… The idea of triple core was a novel approach for CPUs, normally, or better, historically we (the industry) went from 1…2…4… etc, always in multiples of 2x. AMD broke this trend as we had the world’s first native quad-core processor for desktop PCs which allowed us to offer the market a triple-core processor. The significance of this is that now consumers had more choice, OEMs and the channel had more differentiation and AMD offered a product that its competitor could not replicate. But I digress, moving on to gameplay. The FarCry 2 play test:
DELL 30" monitor displaying FC2
I loaded a fresh copy of FarCy 2 and proceeded to crank the settings: 2560×1600, AA 4x, DirectX10 (would have elected DirectX10.1 if available) all other settings were on High or Ultra High. The load time was quick; the game play was smooth, no hitches, no visible issues, a solid great experience. The GPU did not have ATI CrossfireXTM technology enabled as I wanted to play the game with the equivalent of a performance mainstream card such as the ATI Radeon HD 4870. The picture above does not do the experience justice but it looked beautiful, 30 inches of monitor in all its splendor powered by a $145 CPU, unbelievable. But, it’s not a magic trick; I played a few more games to make sure this experience was not an anomaly.
Crysis - Advanced settings on HIGH, 1600x1200 AA 4x - picture taken right before I died
The AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition was a champ, the game experiences were awesome, and why is that you ask? The answer is quite simple, the system I built was a balanced system, I invested more in graphics, which allowed me to have the ultimate gaming experience while not having to invest in a $1000 CPU. Oh, did I mention that these processors are DDR3 AND DDR2 capable, meaning you can use them in your existing AM2+ socket motherboard as an upgrade OR in our new AM3 DDR3 socket motherboards. One of the things I give AMD huge credit for is their continued support of past generation infrastructure, this means cheaper alternatives for consumers and gives YOU the gamer the choice when you want to upgrade.
Enemy Territory-Quake Wars, All settings on HIGH, Shader Lvl Ultra and AA 8x
The old school belief was that to get the best PC experience, one must invest as much as possible in the CPU; this is now a myth, tales of long ago, fallacy, make believe! Don’t believe the Blue hype in the market, you can have a brilliant multi-core gaming experience with overclockability for less than $145. This little triple-core processor is proof of that!1 The GPU and the chipset have become vital decisions when building a PC, the old adage of “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” holds true in PCs today. I was thoroughly impressed with this product, especially when you take into account its price point, its headroom and the market leading chipsets it gets slotted into. Harness a system like this with the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility2 and the AMD OverDrive software and you have the makings of a fantastic mainstream gaming system. Check out these 3rd party reviews to see for yourself: Bjorn 3D: “Phenom 2 X4 940 BE, X4 810 & X3 720 BE
”
- AWARD: “Seal of Approval”
HardOCP: “Phenom II Gets Affordable with DDR3 & AM3 ”
- AWARD: “Editors Choice Gold Award”
Firing Squad: AMD’s AM3 CPUs: Phenom II X4 810 and Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Hot Hardware: AMD Phenom II X4 810 and X3 720 BE Processors Also check out this video and these photos.
1AMD warranty does not cover damage caused by overclocking, even when using AMD OverDrive™ software.
2 THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.