Phenom II Meets Dry Ice
Months befores AMD Phenom II processors hit retail shelves the marketing department at AMD was in hard at work showing both the media and the enthusiast community
and that Phenom II processors were overclocking giants once again. The
original AMD Phenom processors were sensitive to temperature changes and
once you got sub-zero they often had negative scaling when it came to
overclocking. With the vast majoirty of Phenom processors hit a wall at
-20C the most extreme overclockers were out of luck. AMD has done a
great job at getting the word out that Phenom II is a new and improved
processor, but how do these new Phenom II processors overclock with
extreme cooling? AMD showed us that the temperature bug is long gone by
running a AMD Phenom II X4 processor at 1.95V and at below -190C, but
what can we pull off on our own test bench? This weekend we purchased
ten pounds of dry ice along with some Acetone to see what we could get a
pair of Phenom II socket AM3 processors could do on the ASUS M4A79T
Deluxe motherboard.
