[H] Enthusiast – AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition Overclocking
AMD’s Overdrive application is second to none in the world of software overclocking tools. It is easily used inside of Windows to overclock your BE processor. You can control northbridge and CPU voltages easily while also toggling your CPU’s multiplier. It also has a built in stress test that will help you find the processors overclocking limits as well.As you can see above, we were able to get a very stable 700MHz of overclocking headroom 3GHz out of our Black Edition Phenom 9600 running for over 14 hours at full load on all four cores. Out of the four Phenom samples that we have used, one would do 2.8GHz, one would do 2.9GHz, and two would clock to 3GHz reliably. Running this retail processor on air cooling, we could achieve a stable 2.8GHz as well and even get it to run at 3GHz, just not under a 100% load across all four cores.
The AMD Overdrive application looks like a great way to overclock without having to muck around with the BIOS. Hopefully, Intel comes out with their own version. For the moment, if AMD can produce Phenoms without the errata error and increase the baseline and overclock speeds, there should be some great performance to eke out of the Phenoms.