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We were a bit surprised to see that AMD stuck with the 95W TDP rating. The much smaller dice should be able to deliver decent performance with much lower energy consumption. AMD decided to set the VCore to an ridiculously high 1.4000V which is the same as the Phenom II 965 Black Edition. Also, for some reason the idle power of this CPU only reduced to 1.1200V. That is very disappointing.
Overclocking:
Due to the high VCore we believed this CPU would go past 3GHz without the need of any VCore increase. As you can see, getting to 3.40GHz with our MSI 790FX-GD70 board was a piece of cake.
Increasing the VCore to 1.5500V we could manage a stable 3.70GHz. Don't be shocked about the high VCore, because there is no L3 cache the temperatures are always in safe limits and always below 60°C while the CPU is specified with 71°C. There are also no worries about Cool'n'Quiet as it will work flawlessly, because this voltage will also be increased if you go over the specified VCore.
