However, the results obtained without any voltage increase are only interesting if you are not ready to deal with considerably higher power consumption and heat dissipation during your overclocking experience. We decided not to stop at that point and pushed the CPU core voltage to 1.55 V to hit even greater results. Increased Vcore provided additional room for further CPU frequency growth, so we could get our processor to run stably at 3.72 GHz. It was obtained by raising the clock generator frequency to 266 MHz.

At least under Vista 64 as Vista 32 was much different. The settings mentioned earlier allowed us to reach a stable 4.275GHz (19x225) with the same components. However, we are not utilizing Vista 32 in testing anymore, especially considering our standard benchmarks are completed with 4GB and 8GB configurations on the DDR2 platforms. As such, it appears at this time that any overclocking comparisons will be limited to under 4GHz on the AM2+ and AM3 platforms. We have addressed this problem with AMD again and hopefully an answer is forthcoming. In the meantime, we figured out a way to get a screenshot above 4GHz before we received the standard BSOD routine. At least it is a consolation prize at this point.

A CPU-Z screen shot of the highest overclock of the day: AMD Phenom II X4 processor running at just over 6.5 GHz on Liquid Helium.

The platform comprised a Phenom II X4 940 processor, DFI's LANParty Dark 790FXB-M2RS motherboard, some OCZ DDR2-1066 memory and two Radeon 4870 X2 cards in CrossfireX running on Windows XP. To keep the processor stable at this speed with its vCore pushed up to 1.84v, liquid helium was the choice of cooling and allowed it to drop down to a temperature of -242 degress Celcius. Other settings include a bus speed of 280 MHz, multi set to 22.5 and HyperTransport frequency at 8. With the two Radeon cards clocked up to 800MHz on the cores and 950MHz on the memory, the team then fired up 3DMark05 and nabbed world record position in no time.

It's debatable if the power consumption is worth the performance or even whether our Phenom II can survive the elevated voltage in the long run. However, at the very least the Phenom II and its enhanced overclocking allowance should bring some excitement to the AMD enthusiast scene. Although our attempt topped out at 3.8GHz, it was a rather smooth overclocking experience and with more luck, it should be able to break the 4GHz barrier with air-cooling. That by itself makes the Phenom II a more than worthy successor.