Hi,

One year ago AMD launched their Phenom II X4 CPUs in CES Las Vegas. This was a huge comeback from AMD and big thanks goes to their engineers who managed to get rid of cold bug and made CPU's clock frequency to scale exceptionally well with cold and vcore.

This was good news for overclockers and we were back in business benching CPUs with full pot of LN2. Year 2009 was very rich for AMD overclocking wise and several milestones were broken:

  • Overclocking microprocessor successfully with Liquid Helium (LHe -269 Celsius)
  • Achieving +7 GHz clock frequencies
  • World Records in 3DMark05 and 3DMark06


Here is a video from AMD of some of the events and overclocking results made in 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Hf6d404QY

This year AMD joined in XS CES party with LN2 cooled test system including Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU, Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 motherboard, 2 x Gigabyte Radeon HD 5970 VGAs and CPU & VGA pots made by Aaron Schradin.

System was well prepared and pre-tested by chew*, I just lent my hand to pour some LN2, answered people's questions and encouraged chew* to push CPU over 6,5 GHz

3DMark05:

In 3DMark05 two 5970s in 4 GPU CrossFireX configuration were so powerful that the system was COMPLETELY CPU bound. Unfortunately CPU's northbridge wasn't very strong but we managed to run 3DMark05 @ 6510 MHz and got over 49k points. Overclocking the VGAs didn't help at all:





CPU @ 6510 MHz
VGAs: 800/1200 MHz


Unigine Heaven Demo (DX11):

Unigine Heaven Demo is a new DirectX 11 benchmark. It is quite long and VERY much VGA bound. We ran CPU @ +6 GHz and while 5970s were not working very well under cold, chew* had made one trick to cards which allowed to run GPUs @ +1 GHz. This was basically just for the show with 5 pots. GPU temps were measured with thermal sensor integrated in chew's finger





CPU @ +6GHz
VGAs: +1000/1200 MHz


Some more pics from the event:













From my behalf thanks to AMD (Simon&co), Aaron&Chew and Fugger. It was nice to catch up with many people who I've met before and of course it was great to meet all the new people I have just seen in XS but never in person