Overclocking

Our overclocking experience with AMD CPUs has not been what it once was. There was a time when we could push an AMD CPU and get a 40 to 50% OC. However, with the introduction of the Phenom we saw much of this go away without the use of major cooling. As we noted earlier, the T-Max is 62c; this puts high voltage use out of the reach of air and simple water cooling.

In the end we found that we could get up into the 4.5GHz range as long as we did not try to run anything more than CPU-Z. To get a good stable OC we had to back off to 248 MHz for the bus, leaving the multiplier at its normal 16. We did push the voltage up to 1.4 for stability, though. We plan to play around a little more with this CPU in our dedicated review of the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula.

You can see the validation for the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T here.

AMD Overdrive

As motherboard makers are making overclocking tools, AMD is also dropping in one of their own. This is called AMD Overdrive (or AOD for short). AOD is an interesting tool in that it can give you a ton of information about the motherboard you are using as well as the CPU in place. I was surprised that it was even able to break down the internal components of the CPU, letting me know which build of IMC is inside.

Of course, that is not what most people would use AOD for. It does have complete controls available for tweaking your CPU and getting the most out of it. You have a full view of the temperatures and voltages in operation on your board as well as the ability to scale the CPU based on steps from stock to extreme.

The individual core monitor is great and will also show you when Turbo CORE is active.

I found this utility to be a of great use during the testing of the 1090T even though I did not use it to overclock the CPU. It still provided me with much more information than I was able to get from using multiple tools.

Another good thing to note is that AOD did not conflict with the ASUS overclocking tool, TurboV. This is good to know as you can use TurboV to overclock and still have all of the great information that AOD provides.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.