Youtube – The Dry Ice Inception – Phenom II X6 1090T @ 5.5GHz

The Setup

The Results

5.547GHz Core #1 SS (Couldn’t get a valid at this speed for some reason)

5.5GHz Core #1 Validation

12.844s SuperPi 1m

13m 30.328s SuperPi 32m

4.93s wPrime 32m

Now you guys see what I mean when I didn’t wanna hype it. Only a few results worth sharing. Next run I promise more results!

Oh and there is an all 6 core max OC result in the video that I didn’t SS.

Video will be up soon.

Thought you guys would appreciate some pics

Went to the store today and bought the following:

Dielectric grease to coat the board to prevent condensation from getting at the electronics of this very precious motherboard.

I couldn’t get any moldable eraser, so I though this would do. It said on the package that it was non-drying, non-cracking, and prevented seepage from water. It provides just the perfect seal to prevent condensation.

Dielectric grease applied around the socket and board.

Plumbing putty applied around the socket. Nice and easy.

Picked up my box of goodies from the benchpartner (Addies) today.

The DICE Pot

Ready To Go

Stay tuned guys. After my DICE run tomorrow, I will be posting a massive result thread, and making an HD video of the run.

Hey guys. I did some more tuning, got more results. So I am throwing together my second slushbox blog. To see the first one, click here.

I tried to place my rad in the cooler this time so that the ice covered more surface area. This resulted in idle temps of 0-1C. So i pushed my Phenom II X6 1090T even further.  Here goes my second set of results.

4.806GHz All 6 Cores @ 1.648Vcore 1C idle – Validation

It took me an hour to get this validation. I could only previously validate 4.73GHz. I needed to reposition my rad for better surface area of ice. Then I had to wait for my temperature to drop to 0-1C before I made the final push. I couldn’t get any further without going above 1.648Vcore. Here we have it, 4.806GHz on the slushbox. Can’t wait to see what this can do with DICE.

4.902GHz Core #1 @1.648Vcore 1C idle

I chose 3 of my chips cores for this result, meaning I had to disable 3 in the bios. I had previously tested all 6 individually, and the best clockers were cores #0,#1, and #4. The best of the three was core #1, the one which I decided to push for this screeny.

SuperPi 1M – 4.7GHz @ 1.616Vcore – 14.555 seconds

This is a very fast result. The upper limit for my cpu in 1m. Again, this result only uses three cores. I believe I could improve on this score by tuning my ram a bit more.

SuperPi 32m – 4.608GHz @ 1.616Vcore – 14 minutes, 53.148 seconds

This is the first time I have ever broken 15 minutes in 32m without using dry ice. This score could also be improved through a little ram tuning.

UPDATE: Low Volt Overclocking

I wanted to see how far this thing would go without using insanely high volts. It’s pretty amazing what a little bit of cold can do.

This was my boot speed. 4GHz using only 1.296Vcore. That is stock for these thuban chips.

4.5GHz only requiring 1.44Vcore. These things LOVE cold!

As always, these 1090T’s follow suit with their x4 brethren and respond well to cold. I can’t wait to throw some DICE on these and see how they scale. I’m looking for 5200MHz+.

Thanks for checking out my second session guys. I hope this was interesting. And I also hope to inspire many others to put their Phenom II’s under cold. You will not be disappointed with the results.

Long story short. Today I got pretty bored. I’ve been wanting to put my 1090T under dry ice for quite some time now. However, my bench partner has been busy with work so I could not obtain the dry ice pot.

So I was thinking of ways I could cool down my processor, in order to play around with my new 6 core. Since I own a Corsair H50 AIO Watercooling kit, I decided to have some fun.

I hung the radiator in an old lunch cooler and filled it to the brim with ice. I also threw a bit of water in for more cooling surface area. I figured this could get my processor 5°C or below. I was right. Yes, the slushbox idea is not a brand new innovative one, but I wanted to try my chip under something else then regular cooling for now.

So I pushed my processor to frequencies I only previously thought could be attained on dry ice (at least with my deneb’s). It seems these new Thuban chips pack quite the punch when it comes to running up the frequency.

Anyways. Enough with the chit chat. I threw together another youtube short just like the good old days when I played with my denebs. So here you are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwb1K3_G7Mg

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwb1K3_G7Mg]

Here are all the screenshot results and validations:

4250MHz Prime 95 Stable 1 Hour

I wanted to see how the slushbox worked under a real stress and if the chip would stay stable. The slushbox doesn’t deal with loads too well, but is still kept below 32C at all times. I believe if I had a good enough water setup, I could attain this stable speed no problem without any slushbox at all.

SuperPi 1m @ 4662MHz

I ramped up SuperPi to see what this chip can do. On my previous deneb chips, SuperPi 1m was my bread and butter, my favourite benchmark to run. Since SuperPi is a single threaded application, I imagine if I disabled some cores or ramped up only one core I could get better results.

SuperPi 32m @ 4500MHz                                                        SuperPi 32m @ 4571MHz

My first run was kind of on the safe side. To avoid a crash. However for second run I ramped up the processor a bit. This was the max I could go while still using all 6 cores. Once again, being single threaded, disabling cores might be able to help my clocking.

wPrime 32m @ 4500MHz

wPrime 1024m @ 4250MHz                                    wPrime  1024M @ 4409MHz

PiFast @ 4500MHz PiFast @ 4553MHz

Cinebench 11.5 @ 4250MHz Cinebench 11.5 @ 4427MHz

3DMark Vantage @ 4427MHz

SiSoft Sandra @ 4427MHz

CPUZ SS @ 4730MHz – Validation

In the video I attained a speed of 4.75GHz, however it was not stable for validation nor screenshot. It was only a taken as a video clip. The cpu did not last very long at 4.75GHz and crashed soon after.

So at last, here is my second winter air blog. This time, I focused more on clocking my ram up to see how cold affects that. I used the same setup as previously. This mainly consists of my trusty Phenom II 955 X4 BE, Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P, and Ballistix D9GTS 2GB DDR3 set.

Real quick I just want to share what it looks like right outside my house on these chilly winter days, and a few images of my setup and how I utilize the cold air.

As can be seen, I am simply placing my rig in my window sill, and letting it pull the freezing air through the heatsink.

Last blog I displayed how the cold allowed me to break the SuperPi 1M barrier of 16 seconds through a large gain in cpu speed. This time, I decided to see how I could keep the CPU speed slightly lower, while taking advantage of gains in memory, and northbridge clocks. This time my ambient temperature was only just around -5C to -8C.

First, here is the memory speed I reached through testing. I kept timings the same, as I have them set perfectly to my liking. So I ramped up the frequency. I ended with a bootable NB of 3080MHz, and Ram frequency of 1760MHz.

I got lucky and it just so happened that this Ram/NB clock was stable enough for 1M runs. Note that I have lowered the cpu speed since last blog’s run and still attained below 16 seconds.

I also attempted for 4.452GHz again as I failed last time. I didn’t get a validation, but I did get a snap shot.

Shortly after this was the fate of attempting a validation.

Another thing I played around with, on the past knowledge from Chew* was the voltage tolerance of my chip. He claimed that there has never been a quad to boot past 1.6-1.65V. It seems he is right. Even with freezing temperatures, I could not boot at above that threshold.

I also tried attempting some overclocking using the same method on a day that struck with -20C weather. However, I was having issues. The colder the system got, the higher my CPU temperature went. I couldn’t exactly figure it out. With some advice from Chew* and Aaron Schradin I have found it may be due to either freezing of fluid/material within the heatpipes on my TRUE 120 which stops heat dissipation dead in it’s tracks, or attributed to VRM’s getting too cold due to the ambient temps which causes fluctuation in voltages. To combat this issue I tried even insulating my board with putty! (Yes, a first for an air system, I will have pictures of this for my next blog). However this even failed to curb the issue. I finally attempted to build a cardboard “ventilation system”, which would be used to vent cold air only to the CPU. However once again failing to work. This leads me to believe that the problem lies in fact in the heatpipes of my cooler.

This concludes my second winter air blog. I hope you guys enjoyed reading it. I will be back to post more in the future.

Ahh, the familiar feeling of Canadian winter. A dreaded feeling for most, but hey, I’m an overclocker……and I like cold weather for one purpose….

As some of you may know, I had been struggling to break the SuperPi 1M 16 second barrier using the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (Least efficient board in 1m testing)  configured in an air setup. However, this is no typical air setup…..but it finally got the job done.  The air ambient was around -8C to -10C.

There are chips that are capable of doing this without such cold ambient air temperatures. Mine is obviously not one of them as seen in this test. The Gigabyte board requires at least around 4.3GHz core speed to break 16 seconds whereas many other board are capable of this at 4.26-4.28GHz.

After that, I decided to do a little CineBench run. This was an untuned run. Also note it is in 32-bit windows.

Last but not least, I saved a validation of a 4.452GHz suicide. However, being away from all the updates, I neglected the fact that my CPU-Z was not up to date. This resulted in my beloved 4.452GHz dump to go to waste. Ah well.

What we know so far:

TWKR = “Tweaker”
-We can assume that this means this chip is a special performer for enthusiast overclockers

Special Packaging
-This chip comes in a very mysterious, but irresistible black box

Cherry Picked/Best Binned 955
-Sources state that these chips are some of the best 955 X4’s chosen from the binning process. This could mean that they have a high rate of Electron Migration, or capability for very high clock speeds acquired on low voltage. Rumors are saying that these chips are suited for exotic means of cooling only (ie. LN2, DICE, Water etc.)

It has not yet been announced and early images show it is not for sale
-You cannot get these anywhere, nor do we have any confirmation that they will be for sale in the retail channel

42
-This number gets me. There has been speculation as to what it could be, however, IMO I believe it is some sort of number indicating what chip it is as far as manufacturing. So maybe this could be #42 out of a limited amount.

TWKR, not BE or FX
-As far as the new naming scheme, some people have been speculating that AMD wanted to use TWKR for their best binned BE’s, while leaving the “FX” brandname for chips that are on top of the market (ahead of Intel’s best offerings)

How It Performs
-The answer is no one knows. MainGear is probably putting it to the test as we speak.

Yesterday, a friend and I (he goes by the alias “Addies”) did a fantastic 9 hour bench run.

The system setup was as follows:

Phenom II X4 955 BE
Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P
G.Skill Pi 1333MHz 7-7-7-18-1T
CF 4850s, GPU0: 700/1075MHz GPU1: 790/1100MHz
HX520w Corsair PSU, 300w Bestec for GPU0
Duniek Dry Ice Pot & 20 Pounds of DICE
Vista 32

Benchmarks:

SuperPi Mod 1.5
3DMark06
CPU-z

Our run ran late into the night. With my combined knowledge of the past 2 months overclocking these processors, we took our scores to the highest we could get.

We achieved a 5.040GHz Validation on the Phenom II X4 955 BE. Remember, this is a retail level chip. My previous run only netted me 4.725Ghz as my knowledge was limited.

With CF 4850s rolling, we got the CPU to 4.56GHz 3D Stable, with a NB clock of 3.36GHz. This netted us 23806 3DMarks.

Last but not least, we ramped up the clocks to attain a SuperPi speed of 14.461 seconds. We attained 14.415, but we did not screenshot it.

Enjoy these Pics/SS’s below:

Ever wondered why you can’t get past 3.6GHz on that new Phenom II? Some may claim it is a bad chip, but I for one, can guarantee you that is almost always not the case.

I have been overclocking this chip for weeks and studying how it acts while doing so. I may not be an AMD engineer, or an electrical engineer, but here is what I have found:

1) Voltage

People always repeat the same/similar phrases about these chips “Up the voltage, AMD chips are tanks and can take it!” In fact, I have found with the new AM3 Phenom II’s that it is not always practical to up the voltage past 1.5Vcore if you are just looking for a 24/7 overclock. Before upping Vcore, take into account what else may be causing stability. It could be an unstable NB (IMC) or Ram. I suggest finding the max stable ram and NB clock before OCing the CPU cores.

Also, you may run into your system not booting with more than ~1.475vcore. This is because these new Phenom II’s actually dislike and do not tolerate high voltages a lot of the time. You are lucky to gain a chip with high leakage, so that you can sustain stability with 1.55V+

A common misconception is that these 45nm Phenom II’s are using dangerous amounts of voltage for anything past 1.4Vcore. Comon people, these aren’t 45nm Core 2’s or Core i7 CPUs. AMD’s 45nm process is completely different, and can maintain higher voltages without any traces of degradation. However, I do not suggest going over 1.55Vcore for a 24/7 air OC.

Last but not least, remember that voltage adds heat to these chips, of which they do not like under high clockspeeds.

2) Heat

The max heat these chips can tolerate without risking damage is 62C. However, instability and crashes can be caused all the way back into the 50-55C range.

Through experience, I, and many others have noticed that these chips LOVE cold. In fact, they scale way better with cold temperatures than adding more voltage to the mix. A great example of this can be seen with some Dry Ice results on these chips:

Take a good hard look at that overclock. 4.6GHz with only 1.408vcore. Simply amazing. Now do you see why voltage is not always the best?

If you plan on air cooling, pick up some nice high CFM fans (as long as you can stand the sound) and a nice heatsink cooler such as the Xigmatek S1283 or a Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120.

3) Multiplier Overclocking

If you are like me, and have a Black Edition cpu, you have probably figured out that overclocking is a piece of cake by just flicking up the multiplier and being done with it. This is not always the case.

I personally recommend against just using the multiplier. Many people have found that using a lower multiplier and a higher HT Ref. Clock can help increase your max overclock+stability slightly.

Not only that, but only using the multiplier will not always net you the best performance. Sure you can hit 4GHz with a 20X multiplier, and a bit more voltage. However, through benchmarking or game performance, you may find it is performing worse than someone else’s comparable 4GHz using a higher HT Ref Clock. This is because when you up the HT Ref Clock, it also increases ram speed, HT link speed, and NB (IMC) speed. Just remember to watch the stability on each of these.

4) Troubleshooting/Stability:

Here is a direct quote from our very own Chew*:

“Im sure some of you may have experienced a crash with cinebench………sometime you will blue screen, somtimes you will just black screen and sometimes the bench will just crash ( dissapear, etc just shut down ) and windows will still be up………..the blue screen is NB vid/IMC memory related, the black screen is core clocks/cpu voltage related and the just crash/dissapear from desktop is temp related………….”

Next time you experience a crash, take a good hard look at that for reference. Chew* has more experience than I with these chips, and honestly, he is right about the crashes. I checked myself.

The best method of finding stability on your overclocks is to use Prime 95. Now it is usually debateable for how long you should run a program like this. For the Phenom II’s however, you need to wait all the way until you can be sure the IMC (NB) is stable. The NB is stressed the most during 512K FFTs. This happens about 2-3 hours into Blend, so I suggest running for at least 3 hours.

Here are a few fixes to common problems:

4GHz stable is not easy with these chips (mostly the quadcore Phenom II’s). Highly unlikely. In order to achieve 4GHz 100% stable, you need 32-bit windows and you will have to back off memory and NB clocks (maybe even going below stock). However, it would net you greater performance with a 3.8GHz and 2600-2800MHz NB.

If experiencing memory instability, try upping the NB voltage (not CPU-NB VID).

If experiencing overall instability, first check to make sure ram is in check at stock speeds. If that is not the case, try giving the CPU-NB VID +.100 or +.200v.

As a last resort, make sure you have the newest BIOS!

5) Tweak!

Honestly, I mean it. Mess around with as many settings (even if you think they won’t change anything) as you can. Every setup is different so experimenting won’t hurt. There is still more to be discovered about these chips!

And this concludes my basic Phenom II AM3 Overclocking Essentials Guide. Hope this will prove a useful reference in the future!

AMD hosted a fantastic event for the prime purpose of overclocking the Phenom II’s to the utter limits.

Records were shattered, the liquid helium and nitrogen kept flowing, overclockers worked around the clock, camera’s flashed and filmed, and processors and motherboards were killed in the process.

I had the lucky opportunity to attend the event thanks to AMD. I was one of the overclockers although I did not have a benching rig to myself. It was meant more to be a learning and observing experience to me, as I have never dealt with nitrogen or helium on computers. Furthest I have gone as far as exotic cooling materials is dry ice (a video can be seen on my personal blog under videos).

When I first walked into the CEC (Customer Engagement Center), I was welcomed by air conditioning, a good contrast from the hot Austin sun. The front desk was complete with a huge AMD logo behind the receptionist desk, and nice glass wall panes with the slogan “The Future Is Fusion”. The CEC was complete with a board room, theater, demo computers all over, the food bar, and of course, the overclocking setup. The overclocking setup was very cool. A few tables, and lots of hardware (platters of chips, stacks of graphic cards, and boxes of motherboards). What made it so exciting was the monitors in the glass cases behind us. During the event, these monitors were playing back the previous AMD Overclocking event videos. Not only that, but suspended in each one was a naked silicon chip of various past AMD products. Very fascinating.

The CEC was probably the nicest building I have ever been in, not to mention the whole lone star campus was amazing. Good job to whoever designed that one. I’d like to thank all the wonderful people at AMD for putting up with us overclockers taking up all the space in the CEC.

I got to meet some other cool overclockers with great experience and knowledge. [XC] gomeler, chew* and k|ngp|n of xtremesystems.org (chew* is also here on techreaction) were the ones doing all the helium/nitrogen benching on site. Not to mention all of the very kind people at AMD that were just too concerned of taking care of us overclockers (Pat Moorhead, Simon Solotko, Nigel Dessau, Ian McNaughton, Pete Hardman, Matt Davis) and I personally thank all of you for that. Last, but not least, I met HotHardware’s Mat Miranda, the Inquirer’s Charlie Demerjian, and Carl Poirier from Neoseeker.

For the day AMD busted out the dewars of liquid helium and nitrogen (-196C & -269C), some of the coldest liquids known to man. These fluids are sacred to the extreme overclocker. It was really cool watching Hardman and K\ngp|n work with it. Other than that, cooling involved a few pots (one of which was helium) from Aaron Schradin and some of K|ngP|n’s pots (F1, and a prototype)

I spent most of the day observing and watching chew*, k|ngp|n, Hardman and gomeler work their magic. These guys are very methodical and the way they work is interesting. I’m pretty sure chew* knows the new AM3 Gigabyte board (MA790FXT-UD5P) better then Gigabyte’s own engineers. K|ngp|n pushed the frequency envelope by getting some of the worlds (if not) highest all four core quad core frequencies. Gomeler had troubles during most of the event, but did not give up and kept going. Ultimately the next day he got some fantastic 3DMark runs.

A few things that really impressed me: k|ngp|n shattering the 3D06 record as well as hitting ~6.89GHz on helium (-230C~ under chip load), chew* attaining 6.634GHz on LN2, when some of the guys went as far as delidding a few chips for better cooling results and the whole atmosphere of the event. You can ask anyone there, I was at a loss of words. Was probably the quietest guy around.

The clear LN2 pot was really interesting. Aaron Schradin of immersi solutions designed the world’s first clear pot. Aaron was also a very nice and smart guy to meet, enjoyable to have around. The science behind the pot is that they used a clear tube made of lexan material and mounted that on top of the copper base that makes contact with the CPU. Once this was done, they mounted another larger layer of lexan to be the thermal insulator. This layer in between the tube where the LN2 is poured was filled with everclear (grain alcohol, and no, we did not drink the stuff after ) to prevent the whole thing from freezeing solid and breaking. You would think a clear pot would kill cooling performance, however, this one held it’s own at a solid -190C. Great pictures of the pot can be seen in the Inquirer article and the CrunchGear articles.

Another highlight of the day was when some of the press guys and a few others decided to smash a LN2 frozen burrito and watermelon, great stuff.

Last but not least, I got to play around with some LN2 myself for the first time. Of course I did not expect to pull any crazy results just like that. One feat was that I was able to get a NB OC of around 4200MHz easy. Other than that, core frequencies just weren’t working for me. Man LN2 is that cool stuff. Looking forward to experimenting with it at home in my near future! Now….Just to get my hands on a nice pot and dewar.

So, all in all, that was my play by play experience of the overclocking event. Fantastic job with the Phenom II AMD, it is a great product and can pull some monster numbers under extreme cooling!

All this being said, I’d like to say one HUGE thank you to all the people that made this possible. The invitation was definitely an opportunity that I will remember and cherish.

Here I have gathered a few links of some hardware sites with more pictures, information, and overclock results on the event. And yes, I am the guy in the black v-neck shirt and glasses in all the pictures.

Enjoy:

XS Thread
OCN Thread
Inquirer Article
Neoseeker Article
Crunchgear Pics
Crunchgear Full Article
Legit Reviews Article

Overclocker Results:

K|ngp|n Result Thread
Gomeler Result Thread