The teasing is over - Phenom II 940 Air, DICE, LN2 - OC round up!
Hi folks!
finally it is NDA-fall day and we can publish the scores of the new star of AMD - the Phenom II 940 for Socket AM2+. There has been a lot of bs from hardly 5 gig LN2 over coldbug at -70°C until slow 17.7s 1m 4 gig - we will proof them all wrong in this extreme overclocking test.
We will use common benchmarks like SuperPi, Hexus Pifast, wprime v1.55 and some 3D Marks. Thanks to Jens (known as "MusicIsMyLife") for his help with many tests and the team Benchbrothers from Cottbus for our first LN2 session in Germany By the way there was a little private "Foxconn-Battle" between us. Jens was armed with a Foxconn Destroyer and I choose the Foxconn A79A-S Both got chips from AMD - thanks a lot!
test hardware:
Foxconn Destroyer nForce 780a
Foxconn A79A-S AMD 790FX
2x Ati Radeon HD4870
Thanks Foxconn for these parts!
AMD Phenom II 940
Gigabyte 790GP-DS4H
Nvidia 280 GTX
OCZ Elitestream 1000W PSU
OCZ Reaper RPX10004GK 4 GB
Samsung 160 GB HDD
cooling:
Air: Scythe Infinity + 120mm fan @12V
DICE: Otterauge full copper SE
LN2: Otterauge full copper SE, Otterauge Alu-Pot
Part I: Air cooling default speed
I skipped these but MusicIsMyLife tested it all on Foxconn Destroyer.
3.000 MHZ - 3D Mark 2003 - 52803 points - GeForce 280 GTX - Foxconn Destroyer
3.000 MHZ - 3D Mark 2005 - 20410 points - GeForce 280 GTX - Foxconn Destroyer
3.000 MHZ - 3D Mark 2006 - 15990 points - GeForce 280 GTX - Foxconn Destroyer
Part II: Aircooling overclocking
I directly went for some overclocked results. At the very beginning we did a direct comparison between Destroyer and A79A-S. Thanks to the higher NB and HTT the Destroyer wins but I am still tweaking my A79A-S and finally reached 260 HTT but haven't tested under air for a long time now
Clocks for our fastest 1m were close together. If you reach a certain wall you will not be able to beat it with more volts. Only cold helps to get higher then. A bit strange when you see how far the chip on the Destroyer went for wprime32m and 06. We did not fully tweaked both boards yet so there might be some slight differences possible when you spend more time with it.
In 32m both boards are close together again. More NB clock and the Destroyer would have the same time. My CPU could not pass 32m with 4 GHZ on all cores.
In wprime1024m the Destroyer shows that memory speed and HTT can give you a bit more performance. With more HTT the A79A-S would surely be at the same speed.
Unfair play in 3D Mark 2006 : 2x 4870er on the A79A-S against one 280 GTX on the Destroyer Jens' CPU did well over 150 MHZ more through '06
what shows that you don't need ACC anymore for best overclocking results.
3780 MHZ - 3D Mark 2006 - 20421 points - 2x HD4870 - 210 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
3960 MHZ - 3D Mark 2006 - 19319 points - 1x GeForce 280 GTX - 294 HTT - Foxconn Destroyer
Some more benches "unsorted"...
3840 MHZ - 3D Mark 2005 - 24915 points - 1x GeForce 280 GTX - 240 HTT - Foxconn Destroyer
3840 MHZ - 3D Mark 2003 - 57259 points - 1x GeForce 280 GTX - 240 HTT - Foxconn Destroyer
3800 MHZ - 3D Mark 2003 - 77124 points - 2x Radeon HD4870 - 200 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
MusicIsMyLife skipped the DICE cooling so no comparisons here. Everything done with Foxconn A79A-S and 2x Radeon HD4870. Unfortunatly 5 GIG benching was a no go with DICE. Hope that the retails will make it in some time. Scaling with cold and clock is really nice and helps AMD to get to new high scores.
With more HTT and NB clock I could get some better performance out of the A79A-S but run out of DICE during thoose tests 4550 MHZ - SuperPi 1m - 15.359s - 260 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
Not the strength of quad cores and not AMD at all but let's run one 3D Mark 2001 for historical reasons 4730 MHZ - 3D Mark 2001 - 70046 points - 2x HD4870 - 210 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
3D Mark 2003 looks a bit better - waiting for some CFX results which we couldn't run due to driver problems yet. 4620 MHZ - 3D Mark 2003 - 81630 points - 2x HD4870 - 220 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
4620 MHZ - 3D Mark 2005 - 28363 points - 2x HD4870 - 220 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
4515 MHZ - 3D Mark 2006 - 23102 points - 2x HD4870 - 210 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
CPU scales quite linear - 100 MHZ more CPU clock gained almost 100 points CPU Score in 3D Mark 2006 4620 MHZ - 3D Mark 2006 - CPU Score 6414 - 2x HD4870 - 210 HTT - Foxconn A79A-S
Part IV: LN2 overclocking
We met in Cottbus for the first Deneb overclocking session in Germany. Benchbrothers hosted the event in a local computer store. I started quickly with just little LN2 as they only had 25L and I didn't want to take it all away
5610 MHZ - SuperPi 1m - 12.796s - Foxconn A79A-S
5390 MHZ - Wprime32m - 7.005s - Foxconn A79A-S
The Foxconn Battle ended here as the Destroyer with no AMD Overdrive support due to the chipset made it too difficult to clock with so little LN2. The benchbrothers then switched to the Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H with 790GX Chipsatz and made some impressive numbers for an AMD system. They anyway had problems with the Overdrive tool on the Gigabyte as it frooze the system after using it once. So there is still room for improvements.
It was a very nice afternoon with the guys and we had great fun. I was sad that the 3x HD4870 CFX wouldn't work good even hoschi borrowed me a really good card (default bios up to 850/1200 in CCC!). But we are already trying to figure it out
Summary: You'll get a fun and fast chip with the Phenom II which makes it easy to update an existing AM2+ system. I will do so as well with my all day system. I like the fact this chip stays really cold. For benching it is good for wprime and will take "Quad-WR" very soon I think. 06 is also very nice and I personally like to bench 03 with full AMD setup (when CFX is working...).
This chip has enough power for ALL games and most of the work things that you can do with a computer. I personally don't see a need for i7 as I can perfectly live with the cheaper Phenom II - my new processer favourite beside the E8600
Thanks: goes to Sascha "Saaya" Krohn from Foxconn for supplying us some great hardware and lots of information, AMD and OCZ for their support with hardware. Hopefully this relationship will continue for a long time
Very nice post. I look forward to receiving my own copy of the 940.
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i see you ran everything at different speeds. is this because its the highest stable frequency you could get for that test? or is it just random tests while you were tweaking around with it?
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amd 940 @ 3.5ghz stock voltage or 3.7ghz 1,425v home made cpu block3616 mhz and 2210mhz nb stable
gigabyte ga-ma790fx-dq6
sapphire hd4870 1gb @ 160-200 in idle , 750-950 load, with 2 rivatuner power profiles shortcuts.
2x 2GB OCZ Blade 8500 ddr2 1066 @ 1.85 volt
seagate barracuda 7200-11 1x500gb & 1x640gb (rip 1 500gb barracuda )
seagate barracuda 7200-12 1TB , very nice hd, 5 degree colder then the 640gb
windows xp 32
lian li pc-a70b
cooler master real power 850watt
i see you ran everything at different speeds. is this because its the highest stable frequency you could get for that test? or is it just random tests while you were tweaking around with it?
well every bench could maybe be run at ~50-100mhz higher with some tweaking but basically these were the highest speed we could get "right away". We always aimed for fastest "quick" scores maybe that says it best
@Dr_Swizz 1.35V default, 1.5V safe with good air cooling
i see you ran everything at different speeds. is this because its the highest stable frequency you could get for that test? or is it just random tests while you were tweaking around with it?
Since its a oc review, my guess would be its the best run at which the benchmark finished and taking a SS was possible.
I have a question though. Have you had early RB-C2 samples with cold bugged HT3.0 and respectively low NB clocking or newer chips like SF3D, Macci and Sampsa are showing in another thread??
The origonal spirit of overclocking was to buy cheaper hardware and tweak it to perform as good as higher end more expensive hardware. Phenom 2 fits perfectly for this task.
so many people seem to have forgotten this.
I still dont believe in a L3. It simply makes no sense when looking on the size and past history. Itanium only got a L3 due to the massive sizes of up to 24MB and soon 30MB. And I dont think anyone here on the board got access to a nehalem system, nor will have it for the next 3-6 months.
L3 is a step backwards for mainstream, not upwards.
Just as you did before, you set the high marks for all of us amateurs to try and attain
Thanks for everything you do!
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Raptor X 150G Boot Device & 3 X WD 500GB in RAID 5 Load Device
8G OCZ Reaper @1066
2xVisiontek 4870 Xfire @790/1080Mhz w/XPSC Water Blocks
Razer Barracuda Sound System
Windows Vista 64 Bit SP1
LG 24" 1920X1200
By the way there was a little private "Foxconn-Battle" between us. Jens was armed with a Foxconn Destroyer and I choose the Foxconn A79A-S 
: 2x 4870er on the A79A-S against one 280 GTX on the Destroyer Jens' CPU did well over 150 MHZ more through '06
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