AMD's Winter Update: Athlon II X3 455, Phenom II X2 565 and Phenom II X6 1100T
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 7, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
- Athlon II
- Phenom II
Overclocking
All three chips here are easily overclockable. The Phenom II X6 1100T could hit 4GHz however not stable enough to make it through our test suite with stock cooling. I ended up at 3.89GHz for the 1100T:
The Athlon II X3 455 proved to be even more potent than the 450 sample I tested last time. I managed a 3.85GHz overclock out of this one:
The 3.85GHz overclock held even when I enabled the chip's disabled 4th core.
Finally the Phenom II X2 565 BE hit an impressive 3.92GHz even with a third core enabled:
While overclocked the best value continues to be the Athlon II X3 455 which now performs like a Clarkdale Core i5. Unlock the fourth core and the Athlon II X3 455 is faster than a Lynnfield Core i5 in threaded applications:
You do pay the price in power consumption, the added voltage necessary to reach these higher clock speeds manifests in much higher power consumption. Such is the tradeoff with most voltage overclocking:
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Finally - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
one thing is missing.I'm much less interested in overclocking than I am interested in undervolting.
3 Weeks ago I bought two Phenom II X2 555 BE C3s for my girlfriend's new PC and mine - and guess what? Both unlocked to quad-cores easily. I was even able to lower the CPU voltage from 1.251V to a mere 1.141V. As a power consumption-meter is on its way to me, I will be able to report power saving numbers, if anyone is interested.
All this 4-core-goodness I got for a mere 75€ a pop.
If that's not great performance for an unbeatable price I don't know what is...
chrnochime - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
And like was mentioned in the article it's not guaranteed that whoever buys the 555/565 BE would be able to unlock the other two cores and run them just fine without instability.When it's a gamble and not 100% success rate, people who value their time and not wanting to return CPUs and getting another to test tend to either go down to the cheaper x3 or pay a bit more for the i3.
ajp_anton - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
I noticed you're using the x264 pass1 test for load power consumption.Is this really a good choise? All cores aren't maxed out in this test. This is obvious when knowing what x264 is actually doing in pass1 versus pass2, and comparing the speeds confirm this.
In pass2, all Phenom II's (x2, x4, x6) have exactly the same speed per core per GHz.
In pass1, the speed bumps are far from the nice linear scaling in pass2. The x6 is only twice (2.13x) as fast as the x2, so almost two cores are idle.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
You'll see this change in the next month when we revamp our Bench suite :)Take care,
Anand
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Yeah, expecting that. I don't quite understand why putting the stupid sysmark on the test...it just can't tell any difference between processors with different performance :)iwodo - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
There are rumours floating around that Intel is gonna make BIG price cut soon for holiday season due to lower then expected demand, clearing stocks for Sandy Bridge, as well as more people buying iPad then PCs.SandyBridge will be a top to bottom chip, leaving Current Nehalem for Servers. ( Which is doing VERY well in that area )
Some of the performance data are already leaked, the only things that is left is on the GPU side as well as Official benchmarks.
yuriylsh - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
just got a notification from Micro Center about $80 instant savings on i7-950, which means $200 for 3GHz Core i7 - not a bad deal. Is it starting?RyuDeshi - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
MicroCenter has been selling the 950 for $199 for a long time now. It has been on SlickDeals front page many times.. They just do that to get traffic to their store, then try to sell you everything else you don't need.jaydee - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The Phenom II X2 565 is 18% (idle) and 23% (load) more efficient than the Phenom II X2 555?MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
The board has changed to a much more efficient one. It's approximately a constant offset between both configurations, as evidenced by the differences in idle numbers.MrS