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Back in mid-September AMD turned its elite team of overclockers loose on one of its upcoming Bulldozer chips, the FX-8150, and ended up earning a Guinness World Record in the process. 8429.38 MHz was a pretty impressive feat, but as with anything in technology, it was short lived. The overclocking crown has officially been passed to Andre Yang, though luckily for AMD, he was still using the FX-8150.
According to the CPU-Z’s Validation page Yang managed to crank AMD’s flagship Bulldozer part up to 8461.51 MHz, using a base clock of 272.95 Mhz, and a 31x multiplier. Maintaining this clock speed wasn’t easy however, and along with a heavy dose of nitrogen, Yang pumped in a punishing 1.992V to keep everything stable. I’m guessing at 2V the chip would launch into orbit.
The memory used was a single 2 GB Corsair-branded module, cranked up to 909 MHz (1818.16 Mhz DDR), with timings of 9-9-9-24T. Yang also following AMD’s lead by disabling all but 2 of the FX-8150’s cores to cut down on heat and allow for better stability.
Intel fan’s will no doubt chime in to remind everyone that clock speeds don’t matter, but they sure are impressive!
Comments are closed on this article
aplusbex1
October 31, 2011 at 9:42am
Congrats AMD you can finally compete with sandy bridge... until it melts after a few hours to a week at most.
Rikaroo
October 31, 2011 at 6:31am
I wonder if this collumn woulda been reversed, if Intel had set the record,,Amd saying it doesn't matter, while Intel insisting otherwise?
EthicSlave
October 31, 2011 at 5:09am
its not that it will likely fall apart
IT will fall apart given enough time
Did you know that they hand pick and burn through like 10-15 chips before landing a hardcore overclocking chip. Wondering how much money they spend on this? Well take this into factor the 1st overclocking achievement was earned with liquid helium (slightly colder than liquid nitrogen) and this stuff is extremely expensive in comparison to liquid nitrogen about 50x more expensive. Seems quite silly to me considering they fire up the torch to bring the temps back up WHY even use it if they are heating it back up again MAKES ABSOLUTELY no sense. nor does it make sense to see how high a clockspeed you could achieve if its only going to last a few seconds b4 crashing horribly.
so by no means is this efficient in any way, just a way to promote a product and tout a title with no real meaning or substance in real world performance
rjohnson11
October 31, 2011 at 2:33am
Record breaking is meaningless unless the CPU can show off the same lustre in real life and this does not happen with Bulldozer with the average consumer
devin3627
October 31, 2011 at 12:14am
YA YOU MOTHERFUCKERS I WENT FROM A 350MHZ PENTIUM 512KB CACHE TO A 1.4GHZ 256KB AND IT FUCKING LAGGED TWICE AS MUCH AND SEEMED 50% INCAPABLE. FUCK YOU IF YOU DISAGREE. I HAD TO DEAL WITH THE EXPENSIVE DOWNGRADE!!!!!
HiGHRoLLeR038
October 30, 2011 at 8:59pm
i wanna know what's 'stable'. Run Prime95 for a few hours? or just hope that it boots? lol
warptek2010
October 30, 2011 at 10:12pm
I think I read somewhere that in the first record breaking it was only stable for a few seconds until it either BSOD'd or the chip shut itself down. Not 100% sure tho.
biggiebob12345
October 30, 2011 at 6:56pm
a) BD doesn't do near as well clock-clock vs SB. 5 ghz SB = 6 ghz BD.
b) BD doesn't overclock as well as SB under normal cooling methods.
So BD sucks ^2.
rawrnomnom
October 30, 2011 at 9:48pm
point being? thats kindof like saying a car can go longer distances than a motorcycle even though it travels slower.... we get it, but really AMD is the clockspeed king.
warptek2010
October 30, 2011 at 5:37pm
So Intel admits it's not about clock speed... then it's gotta be about offering the best bang for the buck.
Welcome to AMD Intel!
MaximumPC story headline I'd like to see:
Intel Corp. Can't Afford it's own CPU. Uses AMD Instead.
avenger48
October 31, 2011 at 10:45am
There's a difference between clock speed and performance. AMD's 8-core CPU's barely match Intel's quads, even in heavily multithreaded benchmarks. I don't care if some of them can hit 8.5 GHz on LN2 with the ideal motherboard for a few seconds. That is meaningless, when it's not actually any faster than an intel quad on air.
warptek2010
October 31, 2011 at 5:06pm
You missed the whole point of the record breaking overclock. It was mostly done to test the chip to see if it was susceptible to the cold bug. Breaking an overclocking record was a caveat.
Even AMD acknowledged on its blog that many felt the performance of Bulldozer was not what was expected. AMD expects much better performance when Windows 7 supports the chip through better core scheduling.
avenger48
November 07, 2011 at 3:58pm
Ok, good, there's no cold bug. That was proved when AMD set the record. This guy is just doing it for the hell of it. Still, I can't say I blame him...
Marthian
October 31, 2011 at 5:26am
like that's going to happen. Those sandy bridge cpus are faster than most of what AMD's offering, why use theirs?
w2ed
October 30, 2011 at 4:54pm
Intel is right: It' not about clock speeds.
It's about being able to have time to play your favorite games, surf your favorite websites or (Oh My God, that could be enjoyable?) spending time with your family and friends because you're not waiting on your computer to process that major project.
To most of you, I'd agree that the record being bested by such an insignificant amount is questionable at best, but it's these sort of things that help us get closer to those end results. While we are a lot closer than we were even 5 years ago, I think we'd all agree it won't be fast enough until those projects can be done in the blink of an eye. Anything less, and there's still room for improvement.
Danthrax66
October 30, 2011 at 5:11pm
I'm confused by your post. Intel says it isn't about clock speeds because they get 20-30% faster results than AMD with less clock speed. I don't understand how that relates to the other things at all though.
alexw1234
October 30, 2011 at 4:28pm
I still more interested in overclocking done using air, not very many of use regualr people have liquid nitrogen tanks just stockpiled in our basement. And clockspeed matters when running single threaded apps.
illusionslayer
October 30, 2011 at 3:55pm
The record was "smashed" by .04ghz
I'm also dissapointed that you think running at 8.whatever while incredibly unstable with nitrogen is impressive. That's like having a car "that could go 200 but would probably fall apart",
Wingzero_x
October 30, 2011 at 7:46pm
And to think .04 GHz would've been really impressive back in 96-97..Oh wait what's a GHz!!
biggiebob12345
October 30, 2011 at 6:54pm
Take a Prius, strap a turbo on it, and crank the boost up to 20 lbs. It'll explode eventually but be bad ass for a few seconds. Same idea here.
Wingzero_x
October 30, 2011 at 7:41pm
LMAO! Just visualizing that Biggie!! What makes it even funnier is picturing the guy behind the wheel(keyboard) with the dumbfounded look on his face.
Oh yeah, my most recent build...Featuring the 8 core Bulldozer did not impress, not even when compared to an old 875K.
