Phenom II X4 Overclocking Master class - Final Words and Verdict

Final words

Overclocking is not exact science, sometimes everything just fits together and goes exactly like planned while in the next session nothing seems to work and everything goes wrong. For me personally both sessions felt in the last category. I have done everything I could, but it just did not go the way I wanted and it did not match up to my expectations.

I want to thank Hilbert from Guru3D for handing out this CPU and I hope the next time I run with an AMD CPU I will hopefully have a little more luck.

And this is where Hilbert takes over again:

So with this little article I hope you guys get an idea of what is involved in 'extreme' overclocking. It's expensive, it's difficult. But it sure as heck is a lot of fun. It's a sport in many ways. Now we really wanted to get you 3DMark results as that relates a little more to you guys here at Guru3D, but the OC system was not stable enough. A couple of days after OldScarface finished his session, his 1200W PC Power & Cooling power supply died, which leads us to believe was the main cause of the instability and not so much the other components.

We'll obviously be working again with OldScarface as his insight in extreme overclocking is so much fun to observe. With this article we do hope you learned a thing or two about the needs and requirements of Phenom II extreme overclocking. We tried in this article for it to be both a learning curve yet also a user experience. As you can read in the final paragraphs of OldScarface's write-up, he was really disappointed whereas I say 5500 to 6500 MHz on this processor is just insane. He's however a professional overclocker with only one thing spinning in the back of his head, he wants to break world records. And like any good sportsman, he was disappointed to not achieve that goal.

Thank you Roger for your insight and experience. And to the rest of you a warning, do not even THINK about replicating the settings you read / have seen in this article please unless you indeed are also super-cooling your equipment with proper gear. The settings you have seen can seriously damage your hardware if you do not understand what you are doing.

With that said (!) this is certainly cool stuff to read up on, and we'll be posting more of it in the future.

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