This section is a little different from what we would normally be presenting since the entire goal of the overclocking today is not 24/7 stability, instead, it is an afterthought. The entire purpose of today's party is to have a look at what the Phenom II can do on the bleeding edge of stability. In addition to a slightly diverse overclocking methodology, our benchmarking process will be quite different as well.
Again, our goal is not to compare the Phenom II in a scientific and methodical manner, in fact; we aren't going to compare the Phenom II to anything but itself. Perhaps down the road those type of comparisons will show up on the pages of Hardware Canucks in a motherboard or memory review but not here, not today. As mentioned, we did take a quick look at the 24/7 stability of overclocking on air so let's go over exactly what that entails around here.
As mentioned, this combination of stability tests will only be seen the one time in the Air Cooling section. The rest of the Air Cooling section and only benchmarks that will be seen in the other benchmarking sections are going to be an effective overclockers toolkit of benchmarks.
The ultimate in bleeding edge overclocking, CPU-Z stability is nothing more than that, the ability to get a CPU-Z validation before the system freezes or locks up. CPU-Z is the standard in validating overclocks in the benchmarking community and is required to help validate pretty much every screen shot taken.
An oldie but a goodie, Hexus PiFast is a single threaded calculation of Pi run in a DOS window. At one time the Hexus version of PiFast was the preferred way of comparing an overclock. The benchmark is still used on HWBot.org for global and hardware points.
The personal favorite benchmark of this reviewer, SPi is another single threaded benchmark that is well on its way to being an obsolete form of benchmark in gauging performance. That said, it is still THE standard amongst overclockers and we have chosen the two standard 1M and 32M calculations for the benchmarks today.
wPrime is a relative new comer to the benchmarking scene but has already become one of the favorites making its way onto the pages of HWBot.org as a recognized benchmark. wPrime is a multi-threaded application that obviously caters to more cores. Comparing a dual core to a quad core is not a fair comparison at all. Some consider wPrime to be a very valid form of measuring CPU power as it utilizes the entire capabilities of a processor and does not rely on the memory subsystem at all.
Ahh the days of Aquamark 3 as a recognized 3D benchmark. Those days are long gone and AM3 is nothing more than a system benchmark that benefits more from CPU power and the memory sub-system than it does GPU at times. The key to a good AM3 score with a modern video card is with plenty of system horsepower.
Not the start of the 3DMark series, but the start of the Futuremark 3DMark series, 3DMark 01 is the sentimental favorite amongst 3D benchers and the first screenshot to hit the forums after a new GPU is released. The one time inconceivable 100K mark in 01 is easily obtained these days but still a goal unachieved by an AMD processor.
The first 3DMark to rely almost entirely on the graphics card, 3DMark 03 really lets quad video card setups really shine but still requires solid CPU power to really stretch a video cards legs. These numbers won't be that impressive in this article due to the limitation of a single GPU we find ourselves with.
Again, the Futuremark series turned back to benchmark heavily influenced by the system, but still influenced a lot by the GPU. Recent 05 scores have been going through the roof with the introduction of the 4870X2 and high clocks on the Intel E8600 processors. AMD again, hasn't touched a top 05 score in years.
Up until this point, the entire 3DMark series has been single threaded but in 06, Futuremark has changed the entire game. Now, in order to compete in 06 a quad core processor is a must have as 06s multi-threaded processor testing eats dual core processors for lunch.
Continuing in forward progress, 3DMark Vantage is also multi-threaded and also supports PhysX. For our benchmark we will have PhysX disabled as that has been the decided standard amongst benchmarkers due to the in-equality between ATI and NVIDIA cards with it enabled. The CPU power does effect Vantage scores a good bit but not near as much as the GPU so it will be interesting to see what kind of numbers these Phenom II processors put up in Vantage.
As you can see we have a good mix of single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks. All of the benchmarks we are going to be running today are counted for points at HWBot.org and it will be easy enough to compare results there with what we have come up with because we have adhered to the guidelines for benching at HWBot.org. I guess that about sums everything up so let's get started with some results. First up, our benchmarking and overclocking on the Thermalright Ultra-120 air cooling.
