Hardware AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU

Which board are you talking about?

I naturally up the PLL and NB

How are you keeping it cool?

I might just try and bribe AMD's Sami Makinen to come to the labs and overclock for me. I suck at AMD OCs. Intel is fine :/

 

I will be going the Core i7 920 route it looks. I can walk across the street to Microcenter on my lunch and pick one up for $229 USD.

It's great that the 955BE can it 7 GHz on some exotic cooling but I want something my wife won't be bitching at me about.

 

Mine is on stock sink, stock TIM. No extra board cooling necessary for those clocks.

Mine is the GD-70, only board I have here to clock with.

If you know MSI, tell them that 212 FSB wall with 4870x2 is killing me...

 

GD70 is an awesome board! If you want the latest .131 beta BIOS, let me know. It cured my ACHI issues - the SATA performance before it was abysmal.

 

Yeah, if you could send me that BIOS and AOD3 (if you can) I could really use both. AOD2 is great, but the last I checked 3 had better control.

 

Found the new AOD, peep this.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=10738611

The actual speed is 3720 or some odd, there's a 3DMark 06 bug. If you set a speed in the BIOS, and then manually lower it in AOD, then it still reports the original multi or HTT.

However, 2330 HTT on air ain't playing around. Especially on stock bubblegum.

 

Yeah, AOD3 is now available here http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_overdrive.aspx

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/164047

£206.50 from Ebuyer now.

We got 4.21GHz out of one of these, "watercooled" last night at the overclocking event, but it was very low flow/low cost system in a hot room.

 

Bindi, do you think a 955 BE @ 4.5 Ghz, as achieved by some folk, using water cooling, would outperform a 4 Ghz I7 920?

 

I guess he's Mäkinen

Anyway a nice and throughout review. I really think my next setup MIGHT just be AMD... I don't really need THE fastest (atleast not if I have to pay for it), but it's good to see at stock clocks these chips can atleast challenge the Intels. So now they are a viable choice, if not much more. Some nice OC-results as well, the lack of cold bug is pretty crazy, but doesn't really matter for most. If only there was a guaranteed aircooling headroom...

 

IF ONLY I COULD AFFORD ONE!

 

Core i7 920 + Intel Smackover + GTX 280 got 103W in idle??? That's low!
Core i7 940 got the same number in other tests...

No here comes the fun part!

Core i7 940 + MSI Eclipse + GTX 285 from the Palit GTX 275 review got "just" 190W in idle! and the same system but with GTX 275 got 169W in idle!

I believe 280's idle power usage is around 25W... 285 and 270 should also be around that value.

How could the MSI manage to eat 65W to 85W more than the Intel board? IN IDLE!

Not to mention that in the latest MSI mainboard review... the power usage test wasn't quite accurate.

 

You're looking across reviews. The power usage test is kept consistent within specific setups. The graphics review for example has a Core i7 at 3.7GHz as well as 6GB of faster memory compared to just 3GB when we originally tested the smackover.

It's almost impossible to read the power usage wrong in each review because it's a simple at the wall reading.