Phenom II X4 Overclocking Master class - Introduction

Phenom II Overclocking Master Class

Over the years overclocking has grown from something underground to something that is commonly accepted and embraced by both mainstream and high-end users as well as manufacturers. Overclocking a GPU or CPU brings in additional performance, almost always for free. it's tricky though, go too far and overclocking can cause instability, break down components and we didn't even mention power consumption here. Though the processor and graphics card manufacturers are a little less happy about all this, it has slowly become business.

Anno 2010 we see the most advanced motherboards out there with extravagant overclocking and tweaking options and even external devices like OC dashboards and what not to help facilitate that overclock.

Processor manufacturers like Intel and AMD also noticed the trend and as such they are delivering more expensive yet highly tweakable processors especially for overclockers and enthusiast end-users. For Intel these are X version (extreme) editions of their Core series. They come with unlocked multipliers and wider ranges of voltages as well as memory dividers.

AMD on its end has BE (Black Edition) processors, also with unlocked multipliers, good memory dividers and often allowing higher ranged voltages. Overclocking is a concept that is familiar to you as a Guru3D reader, chances are that you actually have an overclocked setup, or at the least fooled around with it a couple of times.

There is however another level of overclocking, the professional overclocker's scene, and it's a demographic that Guru3D will be following more closely. It's the extreme side of overclocking, yes the guys that use extravagant cooling methods to lift the core frequency to way higher levels. And today we'll be doing exactly that. We'll have our tame race driver 'OldScarface', a Dutch overclocker, tryout the latest revision of the Phenom II 965BE -- the latest stepping with a lower TDP. The objective is to pass 5 or maybe even 6 GHz on this processor. And to do so, all he'll need is a couple of liters of Liquid Nitrogen, the right equipment and time... lots of time.

Observe how we will bring this processor to unprecedented clock frequencies, and without further ado, let me hand this article over to the man himself, OldScarface. Next page please.