What's New

There really is nothing new to talk about here. Well ok. there is the fact that both of these got a slight speed increase over what is currently available in their lines. The 975 BE gets pushed to 3.6GHz while the 840 gets a bump to 3.2. Overall, not a bad increase, but we do want to see if this is all marketing or if it really means better performance for the consumer.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Phenom II X4 975 BE was not all that hard. We simply tweaked the multiplier and also adjusted the core frequency a little bit (along with a small voltage bump) and we were off. The problem comes from the relatively low overclocks we are still getting.

On a 3.6GHz CPU we were unable to get over 4.2GHz that is only a bump of 600MHz. After the heydays of the Opteron and the Athlon 64 I am used to being able to get much more from AMD's CPU. However, since the introduction of the Phenom and Phenom II, this has simply not been the case.

Unfortunately we were not able to get to overclock the 840 as we ran up against a very frustrating issue with the Cat 10.12 drivers. However, we will be revisiting some AMD overclocking after CES is over with.

You can check out the validation link for the new Phenom II X4 975 BE here.

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.