We spent a few hours trying to overclock the latest, greatest Phenom X4 9850 black edition stock clocked to 2.5GHz and naturally we wanted to overclock it as high as we could.
After half an hour we managed to clock it to 2.9GHz and eventually to 3.0GHz. When we saw that the machine was stable, we moved to the ultimate goal, going over 3GHz. With 1.552V you are at a dangerous playground, but this was enough to reach the final 3.1GHz. At this speed the CPU reaches the 60+ Celsius, which is a very dangerous temperature despite that it remained stable.
We managed to go down to 1.50V, which is a bit better, but at full load we would again finish at 60+ Celsius. With water cooling you should be on the safe side. We used MSI K9A2 Platinum und OCZ Vendetta cooler and OCZ 2x1GB DDR2 1066 Reaper memory. Together with Gainward's 9600GT we managed to score total of 11990 and eventually 12K in 3Dmark06.
The second time we managed to reach 12056. At least there is some potential with this upcoming Phenom X4 9850 Black edition, as this baby should get you over the magic 3.0GHz barrier. The trouble is that Intel´s Quad-core mainstream 45nm can definitely beat this speed or eventually get you to 3.6 to 4+ GHz.
This is still something that we need to see to believe. One more thing, Phenom 9850 Black edition is based on now famous DR-B3 revision that finally works and doesn’t have this overblown and lame TLB bug. The last set of testing has proved that even the cool and quiet works, but you need to set the Windows energy options to minimal.
