Phenom 9500 w/ MSI K9A2 Platinum

[KTE]

Even I have an X2 that works fine on the board. It's just the Phenom.

A word of advice: if you have OverDrive working then you'll get higher MHz. I should get 3GHz. My chip needed no volts or changes to anything but HT speed for 2.6GHz with no WPCREDIT used. NB is what throws everything away though.
To check if you have OD working, all you need to do is go to the 'Preferences' tab and click "Apply". If it works on your system, it will apply nothing and be OK. If not, then like me your system will freeze.

Also I "think" that NB frequency should be 200MHz higher at stock. Not sure.

Soldner: Like I said, OverDrive doesn't work for me though this chip can bootup at 235HT x11 compared to 215HT x11 you were doing stock all volts. Also you have 1.560VCore and my BIOS only gives max 1.525V option. Your NB volts are very high though, it will be heating up pretty bad.

216MHz HT boots perfect for me now consistent but in between that 217, 218, and 219 do not boot. However, higher boots up. I tried to replicate stock Q6600 2.4GHz, closest I got to it was 220x11 2420 which is what I'm running now. Passed all stability tests stock volts.

Going to try BETA BIOSs later.

Memory bandwidth results are very NB frequency linked. The higher, the better. 550 5-5-5-5 2T is not much different to 450 4-4-4-4 2T unless the NB frequency is higher.

No windows tweaks apart from LSC, nor any hardware tweaks apart from what is mentioned.

Ran some more tests early today. I can re-run the above 2486MHz runs at 2420MHz for anyone if they want too but bear in mind there won't be much difference. So here's some other ones today at 2420MHz to compare to Q6600. Enjoy.

Setup











That's all all for now=>

Some of the benches are real bad. I mean POV-Ray built in bench took around 30 minutes and only ever used 114W AC. That's just above idle and I really don't think if coding was making use of cores efficiently it would be 114W. That shows there's a bottleneck somewhere which the coding is limited to.

Thank you for the prompt reply. I was looking to upgrade my secondary rig to an AMD chip not my main. I would have to be high to replace my main rig in my sig with a 2.2-2.6GHz Phenom.

Right now my secondary rig has an E6320 in it @ 3.4GHz. From the look of things currently I'd be better off getting a Penryn for my prime, and moving this Q6600 G-0 to my secondary.

I really want to see AMD succeed though and I have very fond overclocking memories with AMD chips. Competition is win|win for us consumers and I am just looking for AMD to give me an excuse to buy from them again. We will see.

The unlocked chips should be good. IIMO the version to look out for is when the NB is step 3. It's the NB frequency with HT link which messes everything up. You should easily get 235HT even on the x13/x14 chips, so plus 3GHz. But when you leave the NB default, you'll have problems overclocking. Penryn is a optimized Core 2 so its better, especially due to 45nm.

Awsome work KTE! You just smacked up all those tests we've been asking for! Now, when (if) you get bored playing with your 790FX board, please try out your Phenom on a AM2 board. (if you got one at your hands)
Thanks!

I have a Sapphire RD580 AM2 board but DIMM slots are faulty on it and they've not returned me a board yet.

Ahhhh, yeah to it looks like to froze at the start of loading the system files and the partition table wacked out. The boot strap loader started but the system files were corrupted, seen that error many times.

This is good news, it was more of a 'improper' windows start up than some wierd BIOS write back to the drive that screwed things up....

Yep, its not bad. If you mess up an overclock, leave it running, and it'll reboot after a while by itself with stock settings and let you know that the oc failed and has been restored to default.

KTE, are you runing default 1.0 BIOS?

YHPM.

Thank you to all and you're welcome.