AMD processors nowadays becoming more competitive to its direct competitor the Intel company whereas they try to build quality cheap processors but still have awesome performance on gaming. I've experienced it when I switch my system from Intel i7 860 to AMD Phenom II X6 1090T . My gaming still have rocket fps on most games especially when I overclock it up to 4Ghz. But to be fair to Intel, gaming, encoding and benchmark still posses the number one spot because when I try to compare the performance head to head on stock settings, i7 860 still wins but not a greater margin.
Newer AMD systems build what so called the Black Edition in which it provides a easy way on overclocking. Overclocking with a Black Edition Phenom II is as easy as it was using recent Phenom chips. By the way Black edition means that it has an unlocked multiplier in which it is the most straightforward way to scale up and down 100 MHz at a time on a 200 MHz reference clock. For example, with 19.5x keyed in, set the processor’s voltage to 1.60 V which for me is the safest voltage and recommended for aftermarket air cooling. If blue screen loading up into Windows appears, it means you must do some trial and error on memory and multiplier settings of the processor until you reaches out the maximum stable clocks of it. You can used some applications like intel burn test, sisandra software,prime95, 3dmark 06,vantage to test the effectiveness and the stability.
Here are some of my experience when I overclock my Phenom II X4 B55 on a MSI 890FX motherboard:
Test System:
Phenom II X4 B55 Black Edition
MSI 890FXA motherboard AM3
MSI GTX 480 Lightning
4gb DDR3 GSkill Ripjaws X 2133Mhz
HEC Cougar CMX 700 watts power supply
First I set it the maximum clocks to 4Ghz at stock voltage and Cool and Quiet Off. But when I try to boot on windows, BSOD(Blue screen of Death) appears. So I try to lower it down to 3.8 GHz with a 19x multiplier and allowed me to successfully boot into Windows, but starting any of some of my benchmarks resulted crush so I tried set it to 18.5x which is equivalent to 3.7 GHz. At that speed and after increasing the processor voltage to 1.5 V I was able to complete most synthetic and gaming benchmarks. But some of my games like Dirt 3 wouldn’t stabilize in which it sometimes freezes or restart while Im playing. So I try to set 3.6 GHz by dropping the multiplier to 18 with voltage at 1.45V and all the synthetic benchmark and games I've played where all become stable..For me its the best overclock that I saw with the 65 nm Phenoms, but the sad thing is, its not quite still impressive enough and what Im hoping for with Phenom II chips. I think it can still pushes up to 4Ghz but I think it must cranked up the voltage up to 1.65V but Im worried because its to high and probably it can fries up the processor or shorten its lifespan especially when your not using quality aftermarket heatsink fan so remember to select good quality HSF before you do some overclocking. Goodluck....:)
