AMD Phenom II Quad Core Overclocked to 6.3Ghz

(PhysOrg.com) -- AMD has been showing off their soon to be released 45nm "Deneb" desktop chips which have been overclocked to 6.3Ghz. Unless you can get your hands on some liquid nitrogen, don´t expect to overclock this chip to 6.3Ghz. The Phenom II parts were also able to hit 4GHz with air cooling and 5GHz with dry ice cooling.

AMD stated that the extra level of headroom towards dramatic overclocking capacities on the Phenom II is due to a combination of architectural improvements over the original Phenoms first released late in 2007. In comparison to Intel´s top Core i7 processor listed as a 3.2 GHz part has been overclocked to 4.5 GHz on air cooling alone and some claim to have taken it to 5.7GHz using liquid nitrogen.

AMD states that their design works flawlessly from -200C to +100C. Of course the average person is not going to have access to these kinds of cooling methods but the demo does demonstrate that the new Phenom II processors are scalable when it comes to clock speeds and quite stable at high frequencies. The Phenom II X4 scales much better than the original Phenom X4 processors, which is obvious as they showed overclocking on several different systems with numerous processors.

AMD´s Taylor said the Phenom II demos conducted Thursday were done on what the chip maker is calling its "Dragon" platform which is a quad-core Phenom II processor. The Dragon platform will consist of a Phenom II processor, a Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card and an AMD 790GX chipset powered motherboard. With this platform AMD thinks they can take on Intel in the mainstream market, which they think is critical in this day where the economy is uncertain.

The Phenom II chip is due out sometime in the first quarter of 2009 and will be listed to run at 3.0 GHz off the shelf.

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