After a presentation by Sasa Marinkovic (Head of Desktops and Fusion Software, Product Marketing, AMD) and Bernard Seite (AMD Technical Advisor) we were already excited about the potential of the new AMD FX CPUs but there was more to come. We'd love to share more details about the new architecture with you but we must wait, although we will have all the juicy tidbits when the time comes.

After a successful record attempt in Austin, Texas using liquid helium (temperatures of -220 to -230 degrees Celsius), AMD decided to show us what the AMD FX CPUs are capable of under liquid nitrogen (a less impressive, but still amazingly chilly -185 degrees Celsius!). The expert AMD overclocker, Sami Mäkinen was there to show us exactly how this is accomplished.




In order to gain the highest clock speed, 6 cores were disabled with 2 active. The bus speed was set to 266 MHz and the CPU multiplier incremented (starting at 6G Hz right off the bat) to x30 (7.98 Ghz) using the AMD PSCheck utility, which was the highest stable multiplier under those conditions. The bus speed was then upped to 267 Mhz and then 268 MHz to find the highest clock.




A mighty impressive overclock was of 8.0369 GHz was accomplished. As we've seen, more can be squeezed out with a cherry picked processor and additional cooling, but this kind of performance sets a new benchmark and throws the gauntlet down to future CPUs to go one better. It also tells us that the new FX CPUs should overclock very well and scale brilliantly with additional voltage. The ASUS Crosshair V was used to overclock and a max voltage of 2.0V was used to accomplish the dizzying frequency over two cores.




The event and demonstration was a great taster to whet our (and I hope your) appetites towards the new line of FX processors from AMD, and we'd like to extend our thanks to AMD for inviting us along. I'm thinking it might be time for an upgrade.....