Overclocking

The concept of overclocking the AM2 is applicable to the Deneb core too. Important factors like North bridge voltage, Hypertransport speed, CPU CLK, multilpier, vDIMM are important elements that will result in a successful overclock.

In our tests, the Phenom II X4 940 (3GHz) is overclockable to 4GHz by AIR with the use of the AMD overclocking tool or ASRock OC Tuner, the stable condition where most benchmarks will complete is 3.8GHz. In fact, a 800MHz overclock can be achieve using two ways. One, is by using a higher multiplier x 200 (e.g 200x19). Alternatively, we can run it at 15 x 253MHz. Do take note that if CPU CLK is raised to 250MHz, considerations must be made for the Hypertransport speed to fall in the range of 1.8GHz. The memory timings should also be more relaxed and select a ratio e.g DDR2-533 to ensure that memory is not the bottleneck to overclocking.

In the following page, we present some of the screen shots of running the CPU+board at 3.8GHz.

Settings used

{Advanced -> CPU Configuration}
Multiplier/Voltage Change => Manual
CPU Frequency Multiplier => x19.0 3800 MHz
CPU Voltage => 1.5250 V
NB Frequency Multiplier => x9.0 1800 MHz
NB Voltage => 1.3500 V

{Advanced -> Chipset Configuration}
Advanced Clock Calibration => Auto
mGPU => 1.40 V