AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Review - PAGE 13

Overclocking

I was a bit disappointed by the overclock on the Phenom II 955, however maybe with a few more hours of tweaking I could have got a bit more from it. However it seems it does not have more room than the Phenom II x4 940, which I thought it would because of the higher stock clock. It makes sense though, since it needs 1.35V at stock, which is 0.025V more than the 940. The integrated memory controller did overclock very well though. I could reach 2.8GHz but the base clock I had to use to get to the right processor clock as well as the right RAM speed did not allow me to run it at the next higher multiplier, which would have brought it to 2.85GHz.

More voltage on the processor did not seem to help. In fact, the 955 stays very cool when at stock but once the memory controller and the cores are overvolted, it gets quite hot. I am sure with a better cooling system it would go higher.

Here are the final settings used:

• Baseclock of 203MHz, resulting in 203.5MHz
• CPU multiplier of x18.5, for a clock of 3765MHz
• HT multiplier of x10, for a clock of 2035MHz
• Memory multiplier of 4, for a clock of 1628MHz
• NB multiplier of x13, for a clock of 2646MHz
• CPU voltage of 1.472V
• CPU-NB voltage of 1.4625V

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the Phenom II x4 955 is significantly lower than the Core 2 Quad and Core i7, both at idle and load. AMD Cool'n'Quiet is something Intel cannot touch; Decreasing the processor multiplier down to x4 is pretty impressive and effective.

Conclusion

Given that the Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition is AMD's new flagship, I had high expectations about it, and I was far from being deceived. Its top of the pile performance quite amazed me. I did not imagine it could step on the Core 2 so easily. As we have seen earlier, it won the big majority of the benchmarks against it. Also, in many of the gaming benchmarks and even some of the synthetic benchmarks, it won over the i7 920 because of its higher clock. Maybe it would still be able to beat the i7 940 in some cases, but I doubt it could achieve anything against the i7 965. However we cannot really compare them since there is quite a big difference in price.

However, for overclockers, it will not reach clocks as high as the Core 2 or Core i7 on air but once you step up to extreme cooling, the Phenom IIs will skyrocket as we have already seen. I recall that the world-record frequency of 6.5GHz on an x86 quad-core processor has been achieved with the Phenom II x4 940. However it seems the x4 955 has not much more headroom, even considering its higher stock clock. The stock voltage has been increased to 1.35V from the 1.325V on the x4 940.

Furthermore, having that part of the refreshed Dragon Platform allows you to use AMD OverDrive 3. This updated version can activate Smart Profiles on the go so that the hardware is configured optimally for the currently running applications. Also, many games already have preset profiles that can be downloaded. The other new feature is the configuration for DDR3 at 1600MHz via another set of downloadable profiles configured for your specific RAM. The list is not yet very large but it will be gradually expanded.

Overall, I am sure the Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition is the right processor for gamers as well as people more interested in heavy benchmarking. It is priced very reasonably compared to the competition's solutions.