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.
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