Monday, December 15, 2008

Getting To See Phenom II Before It Launches

After AMD showed off the new Phenom II processors and the Dragon platform to the media they went one step further and did a private showing to select forum members that were able to come to a scheduled showing in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Legit Reviews put an alert out to forum members about the event and XstollieX jumped at the chance and made it to the Chicago event (December 9th). By going to the event he was able to get a sneak peak at Phenom II a month before it launches and will be getting one when they launch next month.

The first thing he saw were two large displays. Each one was connected to the new Dragon platform set up in the new Antec Skeleton cases. Each machine was running the Phenom II X4 940, a Gigabyte 790GX motherboard, and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. To show off what these machines could do they had the game Race Driver: Grid set up with the full Logitech driving seat, wheel and pedals. The games were set at the highest resolution and ran flawlessly. They had Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Company of Heroes, and last but not least Crysis.

Then he found table with two more computers set up on it, both were connected to 50 inch displays, and both playing Crysis. The computer on the left was AMD’s new Dragon Platform, and the computer on the right was the new Intel Core i7 @3.2GHz. Both machines were running the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. The two computers side by side ran great on the highest settings.



The last area was more of a spectator event. This was the overclocking demo/contest. For this there were two teams. The first was from AMD and the second team was from Finland. The contest was done in two parts. The first part was air-cooling and the second was done using Liquid Nitrogen. Each team was randomly given Five of the Phenom II X4 940 chips cooled by a Cooler Master Z600 in a push-pull configuration. The goal of this was to achieve the highest stable overclock. Stability was tested with two loops of the Crysis CPU test. Each team worked side by side with only 30 minutes to achieve their highest stable clock. Both teams were using the Gigabyte 790GX motherboard and the 4870 X2 graphics card. The result was astonishing. Team AMD achieved a 3.94GHz clock speed and Team Finland fell just short with a 3.9GHz.

After a short break for the overclockers, the fun began. Liquid Nitrogen was used to cool the CPU. Using liquid nitrogen they were able to bring the temperature of the chip’s close to -180 degrees. Using the new AMD Dragon platform Team Finland won this round achieving a core clock of 6.0GHz. Team AMD fell just short at about 5.9GHz. After they ran the Crysis CPU for two loops they ran 3DMark05. It scored ~35,000 3dmarks when all was said and done.

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