Overclocking, CPU benchmarks

Overclocking the system

With such high-end components inside our CrossFire PC, it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t attempt to overclock the system. After all, with its unlocked clock multiplier the Phenom 9850 Black Edition is just begging to be overclocked. For even more performance, we also decided to OC the GPUs as well.

The CPU came first though. In our Phenom 9850 review, Chris managed to OC his 9850 sample to 2.8GHz, that’s a fairly average OC for the 9850, so I was shooting for something a little bit higher.

Unfortunately the M3A32-MVP Deluxe is an older motherboard that doesn’t ship with AMD’s SB750 South Bridge and therefore support AMD ACC, and I was also limited to AMD’s stock CPU cooler, but I was hopeful anyway.

So what speed did I finally settle on? 3.02GHz:

The only downside to this is that I needed to send 1.5V of juice to the CPU in order for the system to run with complete stability within Windows. At lower voltages stability wasn’t the greatest. This may be a little higher than some people would run, especially on stock AMD cooling. I was pretty pleased with the 500MHz OC though, with an ACC capable motherboard I’m sure this processor could push 3.2GHz or more without any problems.

On the graphics subsystem, I was a bit concerned about the scalability of the two 4870 cards running in CrossFire mode and if it would OC at all; unfortunately my concerns ended up proving correct as I only managed to hit 780MHz on the graphics core (an OC of 30MHz) and 945MHz on the memory (an improvement of 45MHz). The cards would actually run at much higher speeds (790MHz core/1000MHz memory), but not with complete stability. Devil May Cry 4 was particularly sensitive to our OC’ing endeavors.

CPU benchmarks