We're not sure if AMD is trying to crank the hype machine or stalling for time, but either way, company product marketing manager Adam Kozak outlines in a blog post how to "Get Your Rig Ready for the AMD FX Processor." It's intended for do-it-yourself builders anxious to make the jump to AMD's next generation microarchitecture, and it starts with choosing the right motherboard.

The hype and anticipation continues to build for AMD's upcoming Bulldozer launch, and all with nary a peep from AMD. It isn't that AMD isn't talking about Bulldozer -- it is, and AMD just recently announced revenue shipments of its first Bulldozer processors (for servers) -- it's just that AMD has yet to reveal any specifics, like a release date, clockspeeds, and pricing information, leaving the Internet to do its thing.

Stock CPU coolers have their place, like in Aunt Mabel's machine or the spare parts bin. If you're planning to overclock the snot out of your system, a third party cooler should be high on your shopping list, lest you taunt the god of instability with high temps. There's another solution -- you could purchase a processor that's pre-packaged with a high-end cooler, only AMD and Intel haven't been real keen on going quite so far to encourage overclocking. That might change with Bulldozer.

An overclocker from the Czech Republic somehow managed to get his mitts on an engineering sample of AMD's FX-8130P "Zambezi" processor built around the chip maker's Bulldozer architecture and did what any responsible enthusiast would do. He slapped the 8-core ES chip into his rig, pushed the pedal to the metal, and overclocked it as far it would go on air, which turned out to be 4635.6MHz.