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Overclocking

The 3800x2 overclocked suprisingly well; I am quite certain that I would have been able to push it further with a better cooling solution - and I may try doing just that in a few weeks.

For the best performance I was able to achieve, I ran the processor at 1.5V, the memory at 2.7V with 2.5-4-4-8-2T timings. I reduced the HT multiplier to 3x, and increased the FSB clock to 310MHz with a multiplier of 8. This resulted in a 2480MHz core clock speed, 930MHz HT speed, and 310MHz (DDR620) memory speed.

The much higher memory bandwidth provided by these settings resulted in outstanding performance, with some of the highest results we've ever seen.

We did have to use an outside fan to move additional air over the processor's OEM heatsink and fan to keep the system stable, however if I were building an x2 based system, I would probably use a high efficiency cooler like the Gigabyte G-Power as it would potentially allow for even greater overclocking headroom.

If you wanted to overclock your system, here are some hints so you can do so as safely as possible:

• You should reduce the Hypertransport multiplier to 3x or 4x from the default 5x, as you should keep the Hypertransport frequency to 1.1GHz or less
• You will probably have to raise the CPU core voltage to 1.5V or even 1.55V
• You better have excellent cooling too; we had some temperature induced crashes at 2.48GHz with the standard cooler until we added extra cooling.
• Make sure you have good thermal compound applied in a thin even layer, and that the heatsink is making good contact with the processor

Showing Dual Core Benefits

There are real benefits to running two or more cores.

Business users can already benefit from multiple cores - it will "smooth" out their multi-tasking experience, for all intents and purposes, two cpu hogging applications can run at once as smoothly as one could before. High speed DVD burning is just one example of something you could run in the background without fearing bad burns. Graphics rendering can also immediately show great benefit from multiple cores - and so can video encoding with the right software.

But to be able to show you evidence of these benefits, we ran more than one application simultaneously to see whether the second core would help offload some of the work.

We ran WinRAR in combination with LAME encoding for one test. At 12x200 (stock speed) WinRAR's performance did drop from 503 to 459, but the LAME encoding was actually a hair faster at 13:39 instead of 13:41 on the stand-alone test - so basically the two very CPU bound applications ran at full speed!

At 8x310 (overclocked speed) WinRAR stayed at 544 - same as when running alone; and LAME also scored identically to running alone! I believe the slightly lower score at the stock speed was due to contention for memory, but the overclocked memory bus made sufficient bandwidth available for both programs to run at full speed.

We also ran WinRAR with Doom3 for a second series of tests. WinRAR + Doom3 did show a slight slowdown - at stock speeds the frame rate dropped to 106.9 from 118.3, and at overclocked speeds it dropped to 133.9 from 142.7 - but still, this is very little impact for running two very CPU bound applications at once!

Conclusion

The 3800x2 ROCKS.

The gaming performance shows that even when only using one of the cores you can still get very high framerates in popular games; and once multi-threaded games come out - which may take years due to the need to completely re-write the engines to take full advantage of multiple cores - gaming performance will get even better.

The Cinebench and POVRay 3.7b4 results show that multi-threaded applications can benefit greatly from the second core; for applications that are not memory bound (ie they don't spend most of their time reading/writing from memory) you can actually closely approach the theoretical maximum of twice the performance of a single core.

Business users who run several applications at once will immediately benefit from a smoother running system, one that will not drop to its knees under a heavy load - no more worrying about your DVD burning being affected by foreground applications.

Given the current directions of the computer and console industries, you can bet that in the future all major software houses will be re-writing their applications and game engines to fully exploit multiple cores by writing heavily multi-threaded code; and when that happens, just watch the performance fly on multi-core systems.

Highly Recommended. Editor's Choice.