CPU, APU & Chipsets - Page 209

*** Edit 12 February***

It seems that AMD's AM3 Phenom II has a memory problem. The problem rears its ugly head when you have more than one DDR3-1333 (or greater) module per channel. If you have all four slots on your new AM3 board filled you could encounter "unreliable operation".

The Phenom II's memory controller has two 64-bit wide memory channels that when combined (in ganged mode) offer an effective 128-bit wide controller. On most mainboards this means you have four memory slots (2 slots per channel). For the time being AMD is not recommending using more than 2 modules (one per channel) for any DDR3 clocked at 1333 or above. If you have more than 2 modules the AMD quick fix is to change the speed to 1066 and adjust the timings to help overcome the speed loss.

It seems that the root cause of the issue may be linked to DRAM voltage.
It is possible that by slightly overvolting the RAM you may be able to overcome this issue. AMD is working on a more permanent fix already.

***Edit***

***I spoke with Damon Muzny at AMD about this and it is not actually a problem. This behavior is actually by design. The reason is that AMD could not predict the behavior of all DDR3-1333 memory. They found that with certain lower quality memory modules and all four slots populated (2 modules per channel) they encountered instability. They were faced with a choice; either they could drop listing support for DDR3 - 1333 or they could design the system to down clock the memory to 1066 and recommend it to everyone using 2 modules per channel.

You have probably guessed what they chose.

In all honesty you can usually get more performance from a lower clock and tighter latency than a high clock and loose latency. Or you could always bump up the memory voltage and bring stability back that way.
***

The folks at Donanim Haber have gotten hold of an early Phenom II X3 series CPU dubbed the 720 Black Edition and they've run some tests with it to give us an idea of what the triple cored 45nm Heka based chip with a TDP of 95W is capable of.

What do you do if your product line lags behind the competition? Well if you are AMD you get a bunch of crazed overclockers with access to some super cooling and have them push your latest CPU as far as they can.

This group was able to cool a Phenom II down to just above absolute zero (-230 degrees) using a combination of Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Helium. Once at a good temp they notched the Phenom II up to an amazing 6.5GHz.
They even managed to break the 3dMark05 record.

I am not sure what this means other than they did it. Personally I am not impressed by 4 year old benchmarks. I would feel this was something if they ran Vantage, some Rendering or a Current game under this OC. But that is just me.

Something else to note is that a Core 2 Duo Clocked at 6.4GHz is only 354 points behind according to the 3DMark05 Top20.

Read more here.

A testament to AMDs claims about far improved headroom with its latest crop of desktop processors, the Phenom II series, Team Finland has accomplished a wicked overclock which made it all the way up to a whopping 6.3GHz under extreme cooling. Furthermore, unlike other chips that have posted near these speeds, this platform was benchable.

Some early benchmarking results of AMD's yet to be officially released Phenom II series processors have surfaced on the web which give a good indication of the expected performance characteristics.

A fellow by the name of coolice over at Malaysian tech site BreakTheLimit has somehow gotten hold of a Phenom II X4 940 processor and puts it through its paces at its stock speed of 3GHz in a wide array of tests, including Super Pi 1M and 32M, Cinebench R10, PiFast Multithreaded, WPrime 1.5, Aquamark and 3DMark06.

GIGABYTE's own Taiwanese technical marketing dude, Hicookie, has created a very in-depth guide which explains how to overclock an Intel Core i7 920 processor all the way up to 4GHz.

Though AMD's upcoming Phenom II (Deneb) series of 45nm processors aren't set to be launched until the opening day of CES next year (January 9), a few e-tailers seem assured of the launch pricing on the two models that will hit the market initially and they haven't kept it under wraps either!

Leaked documents have recently surfaced online which reveal AMD's 2009 desktop processor plans and also confirms the marketing branding name of the CPUs, Phenom II.

During Kirk Skaugen's keynote today at IDF in Taipei, Stephen Pawlowski hit the stage briefly to chat about a small little thing called Nehalem.

Intel's forthcoming Core i7 lineup of codenamed Nehalem processors are not due to go on sale till the second part of next month.

However, that didn't stop us getting our hands on an engineering sample Core i7 920 processor clocked at 2.66GHz (133MHz x 20) from a secret bunker hidden well underground... :)