AMD Phenom II X4 810 Review & Overclocking - PAGE 15

Overclocking

Overclocking the Phenom II X4 810 was an interesting experience.

With the latest BIOS update, it was dead easy to get the HT frequency up to 240MHz, a 20% overclock, but it took a lot of effort to get the last 15% out of it. It seems that there are some "interesting" interactions between the HT multiplier and memory multiplier, such that certain combinations are not stable.

In the end, I found that it was necessary to keep the HT interface speed below 2050MHz, and the memory did not like going over 1100Mhz.

To get the Phenom II X4 810 running at 3.51GHz, I had to:

• set Vcore to 1.55V
• set HT Northbridge to 1890MHz
• set HT link multiplier to 7
• set HT base clock to 270MHz
• disable C1E

Power Consumption

One test where the Core 2 Quad Q8200 definitely won was the power consumption test - as you can see, the Core 2 Duo Q8200 used 21W less than the Phenom II X4 810 when idle, and 42W less when loaded. This was with both processors power saving features disabled.

Conclusion

By my count, the Phenom II X4 810 won 28 of the tests, and the Core 2 Quad Q8200 won 21 of the tests - and there were five tied results.

What does that mean? Some of these results were so often, so damned close...In the end this means that as long as the AMD Phenom II X4 810 is priced the same, or lower, as the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, AMD is likely to have a winner on its hands.

For business applications, the Phenom X4 810 has a clear lead over the Q8200. For high end gaming, they are both tied pretty well, with a slight (<1%) advantage going to the Q8200 in some cases, and 6% for World In Conflict - but I am sure there are games where the Phenom would have a similar (6%) edge. Its worth noting again that at stock, the Phenom did have a slight advantage .

For media encoding, the Q8200 has a lead.. but only by 10%, and for anything that is memory intensive - for example, compression, encoding, etcetra -- the Phenom II X4 810 has a large lead:  as in more than 50% in some cases.

As we can see, for some applications the Phenom II X4 810 will have an edge - and the Core 2 Quad Q8200 will hold an edge for some others ... but they are very comparable overall in performance. You really cannot go wrong with either one.

The Phenom II X4 810 does have a slight edge in the price of the infrastructure supporting it though. You can get a nice 780G based micro-ATX board for about $75 that should let you overclock to levels reaching are own, but you will be paying closer to $100+ for an Intel board that can take a high enough FSB to significantly overclock the 1333MHz FSB Q8200.

Welcome back to the competition, AMD.

(Side note: Now some of you will rightly point out that a Core i7 920 will beat the Phenom II X4 810 - and I will just say "Duh!". The two systems are not comparable due to cost of processor, and especially due to the cost of the X58 motherboard - that will run you at least $200. You would also need three sticks of DDR3 for best performance, which is not cheap either.)