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Overclocking

The stock Vcore on the AMD Phenom 8750 Tri-Core we received was 1.15V, but I had to push it to 1.37V in order to get the system stable at 3GHz.

We came very, very close to achieving a stable 3.12GHz overclock; and it may in fact be possible to run at that speed, however I was not willing to push the Vcore beyond 1.45V. Really, the only thing I had to do in order to overclock to 3GHz was to increase the "FSB" to 250MHz, and drop the HT multiplier to 7. The memory controller could use some better BIOS support, as most of the problems I encountered were with trying to run the memory at faster than about 850MHz at 4-4-4-12 timing, or faster than 1000MHz at 5-5-5-15 timing - and I was using PC8888 memory, rated for 1100MHz operation.

To get the system to run at 3GHz, we:

• used a Noctua 12 cooler
• set Vcore to 1.37V
• set Vram to 2.1V
• disabled spread spectrum
• dropped the HT multiplier to 7
• left the processor multiplier at 12
• set the processor clock speed to 250MHz

It was pretty easy.

I did try to stabilize the system at 3.12GHz, but gave up after spending hours on it.

Power Consumption

With energy savings disabled, the system idled at 120W at stock speeds, rising to 166W when fully loaded; and when overclocked, it idled at 143W and rose to 230W under full load.

Conclusion

I was pleasantly surprised by how well the AMD Phenom 8750 Tri-Core performed compared to an AMD X2 5000+ and even a Phenom 9600. For office, encoding and multi-media tasks, it held its own at stock speeds against a higher clocked Core 2 Duo E6750 thanks to the extra core. As for the gaming results, before you get to dissapointed, note that all the gaming benchmarks were run at low resolution (640x480), with low detail settings, and no AA/AF in order to judge only the processor -- in a more realistic setting, the differences between the Core 2 and Phenom results would have been fairly insignificant at common gaming resolutions and settings (1280x1024, high AA, high AF) with a modern GPU (8800GT/9600GT or AMD HD3870/ HD3850).

Let's face it, AMD is in a tight spot competing against Intel right now - but this is, in many ways, a good situation for the consumer.

How?

Simple. AMD has to market Phenom's (tri and quad core) based on price for performance, which means that they will tend to be cheaper than Core 2 processors. Mind you, this will help Intel's bottom line, allowing it to charge a premium for Core 2 Duo's and Quads until such a point as the market share for AMD Phenom's is too large for Intel's comfort, and Intel starts chopping prices more.

The question is, will the future 45nm "K10.5" CPU's allow AMD to ramp up frequencies to levels that will make Phenom's comparable to the fastest Core 2's?

Rumours are that "K10.5" micro-architecture was also tweaked for better performance...and I eagerly await testing it.

The bottom line: The AMD Phenom 8750 Tri-Core will provide an excellent bang for buck in business and media processing applications, and will perform "well enough" in gaming in order to keep AMD's market share. The X3 8750 is not an amazing processor, but it is a good one. For many people with older CPU's stuck in their AM2+ socket motherboards, the X3 8750 may be considered a price-effective choice for a possible upgrade.