How To Overclock Phenom II to 4.9GHz

Computer HardWare.As you know, Hardware organized it's Overdrive overclocking finals in Paris over the weekend, bringing in teams from all over the world. The competitors benched and tweaked Intel's new Core i7 platform and achieved some significant scores and frequencies. But along side Core i7, wealso had the opportunity to overclock AMD"s new Phenom II. You read that right--the next AMD processor that's expected to launch in January '09.4,957 MHz. Computer HardWare.

Computer HardWare.Although AMD says nearly 6 GHz is achievable on the new Phenom II, we were not able to attain that frequency. However, with the helpof Jmax, we managed to reach 4,957 MHz. Remember however, that the 940 Phenom X4 BE II, is running at 3 GHz natively. We ran the processor on a Gigabyte motherboard based on AMD 790GX with DDR2 utilizing a cooling system with liquid nitrogen. At this point, based on what AMD tells us, the processor may have a higher potential, but it has an issue of locking at temperatures below -70 °C. To verify that the processor was stable at 4.9 GHz, we conducted some tests and it completed a SuperPi 1M run in 17,769 sec. Computer HardWare.

The XFX X58i Motherboard

Computer HardWare. It is not clear if the new motherboard uses the Nvidia nForce 200 SLI processor, which would provide the motherboard with three x16 PCI-E slots, but in the likely case that it does not, one or more of the three PCI-E slots used for SLI would be limited to x8. The XFX X58i would not be the first motherboard to provide 3-way SLI in the PCI-E configuration of x16 + x8 + x8, however. Computer HardWare.

The XFX X58i motherboard also features silent heat pipes, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, a dual BIOS, a rear panel Clear CMOS button and premium 8-channel HD audio. The motherboard has support for up to 12 GB of DDR3-1333 MHz memory and includes six SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports, twelve USB 2.0 ports and two e-SATA ports. While we wait for USB 3.0 to hopefully come out next year, some flash drive manufactures, unhappy with USB 2.0 speeds it would seem, have begun shifting to e-SATA, so it is nice to see two e-SATA ports included. Computer HardWare.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor [Preview And Information]

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor. Computer Hardware.

Best Video Overclock In The World #1

computer hardware. Best Video Overclock In The World #1

Intel’s Core i7 processor : Best Performance

Intel’s Core i7 processor, formerly referred to as Bloomfield, has been architecturally dissected one bit at a time for the past two years. Talk about a rollercoaster of anticipation for gaming enthusiasts. Gone is the super-quick L2 cache that helped propel Core 2 processors so far ahead of AMD’s Phenom offerings in a myriad of games. In its place is a much smaller L2, a large L3, a HyperTransport-like processor-to-processor interconnect, an integrated memory controller and the reemergence of Hyper-Threading. If we didn’t know any better, we’d suggest that Intel is going after a different market entirely.Computer HardWare.


Ah, but we do know better, and it is. At this fall’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Intel representatives gave us our closest look yet of production specs for its upcoming Core i7 lineup, along with preliminary performance numbers. In addition to exceptional results in video editing, media conversion, and professional workstation titles, we also received a healthy dose of reality for what we’d see in testing gaming performance. Computer HardWare.Quite simply, the Nehalem micro-architecture incorporates a lot of improved technology, which is reflected in the speed-ups seen throughout a cherry-picked benchmark suite. However, it reportedly wouldn’t gain much in the way of gaming—presumably as a result of the tradeoffs made as Intel’s engineers optimized their efforts to retake the enterprise computing space.Computer HardWare.

Gaming System

The idea that “time is money” often escapes all but the wealthiest of enthusiasts, and even a few bucks-up buyers would prefer the experience of building things themselves. But game time is worth far more than build time to the folks who buy fully-configured gaming systems. These results-oriented buyers typically place high value on their leisure time and have no problem paying someone with more experience to deliver an often higher-quality product with backing in the form of a warranty.

Boutique builders have catered to high-end buyers since the earliest days of PC whiteboxes, but only the most competitive survive. Among these are VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest and Vigor Gaming, which are responsible for the three systems in our lab today…almost.
by thomas soderstrom

Foxconn and Gigabyte

Combining minimal power requirements with decent desktop performance seemed to be a nearly insurmountable task for many years, but it now seems to be possible. There are processors and chipsets on the market that will allow you to run a decent desktop system at a very low idle power level, while providing amped-up CPU performance when it’s needed. We’ re taking a look at two motherboards , which their vendors Foxconn and Gigabyte aim at power-conscious customers, and pairing them to one of the most affordable mainstream processors on the market: Intel’s Core 2 Duo E7200.
by Patrick schmid and achim roos

New LQ1000 Integrated Liquid-Cooling Chassis

Dominating the performance PC market, liquid-component cooling lets enthusiasts put a large radiator in a better-optimized location compared to standard heat sinks , but without the complication, noise, or decreased reliability of “extreme cooling” alternatives.

On the other hand, bulky external components and severe case modifications have typically limited the best liquid-cooling configurations to the world of “case mod freaks,” rather than true performance fanatics. Though Koolance has produced a few well-finished liquid-cooling cases for as long as most of us can remember, the majority of alternative designs have either been bulky or under-powered.

Because it has stood the test of time, Koolance became an easy choice when we were searching for a suitable reference point to compare a fresh entry in the liquid-cooling market. That competing product is Zalman new LQ1000 integrated liquid-cooling chassis, which we first photographed for our CES 2008 coverage.
by Thomas Soderstrom

Intel Core 2 Duo

Two years ago, Intel pulled off a coup with the introduction of its Conroe architecture , which surfaced as the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. With this move, the company won back the performance crown after losing a bit of favor in the debacle that was its Pentium 4 "Prescott" design.

At that time, Intel announced an ambitious plan to return to evolving its processor architectures at a rapid pace, as they had done in the mid-1990s. The first phase of the plan was the release of a “refresh” of the architecture 12 months after its introduction, to take advantage of progress in fabrication processes. That was done with Penryn. Then a whole new architecture was set to arrive 24 months later, with the code name Nehalem . That new architecture is the subject of this article.
by fedy abi chahla

AMD : Best for Gaming

AMD just released a beta version of their Fusion for Gaming tool. This application is targeted at
the not-so-hardcore gamer who still wants to get the most out of his or her system. The idea is that at the press of a button that sits on your desktop, you could engage a system state that is more ... let's say ... gaming friendly.

This is what the button looks like.

One of the major features of this software is that it automatically overclocks both the CPU and the GPU. Because of this, AMD will only allow the tool to run on all-AMD platforms, meaning that people who run AMD GPUs on Intel CPUs and AMD CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs will not be able to benefit from this applications.

Sure, the platform focus makes sense in a lot of ways. Adding some sort of value beyond the hardware to your platform is one way to try and get more people to purchase your products, especially when one of your product lines is doing well while another is not. AMD CPUs just don't compete like they used to, and with the overclockability of many Intel CPUs, AMD needs another way to sell their hardware.

If more tweaking is required or different things are needed for different games, AMD supports multiple profiles.

For an overclocking tool, we'd say it does the job, but there's something else that's even more interesting in this application. A little special sauce, if you will, that we would very much like to see available to anyone running Vista these days. But we'll get to that in a second.

The automatic overclocking for the GPU is just as simple as enabling overdrive, except you do it from a button on your desktop. Simultaneously automatically overclocking the CPU is a welcome addition for people who want to safely increase performance but don't know how or don't want to chance overclocking manually. While AMD does offer an overdrive equivalent for their CPUs, combining both CPU and GPU overclocking into one utility is convenient. But this aspect of the tool isn't really for people who already know how to overclock.

Additionally, like the overdrive feature that already exists on the GPU, clock speed and performance increases on the GPU will be temperature dependent. This means that if you are in a warm environment, you could see less benefit from the automatic overclock than someone in a cold environment. Case and component cooling is going to be key in getting maximum performance. And really adding a couple more case fans is still easier for the end user than teaching them how to effectively overclock their system. The only other issue is that performance can decrease with time while gaming because of the temperature increase in the system as it is being used. The temperature issue doesn't really impact the CPU, but then the GPU has a much large impact on overall game performance anyway.

Here's a look at some quick benchmarks we ran.

Intel DG45ID vs Sony BDU-X10S

doing regression testing almost non-stop for the past 48 hours with the recently released Intel G45 15.11.2.1554 driver set for Vista 32 and BIOS version 079. We might add that in Intel's infinite wisdom they generally update the 4-series chipset support page a few days before the actual DG45ID support page that was still listing the 1545 driver set as of tonight (page was updated today with the latest driver set).

This particular driver and BIOS combination along with the recently updated versions of Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray and Arcsoft TMT v125 were suppose to address/improver repeater support among other changes. One of the major updates I have been testing is updated EDID information in the latest drivers for several of our HDMI monitors that were having problems ranging from lack of proper resolution recognition to scaling deficiencies. It appears several of our monitors now work properly and we were having great success with repeater support until things began to unravel earlier today. We also noted that deinterlacing is working correctly now.

However, the dreaded HDMI audio out 2-channel only support (G45 supports up to 8-channel out) reared its ugly head again as did the lack of repeater support on one of our main HT configurations after a simple reboot. Both problems seem to come and go on this board at will as well as several others that we will discuss shortly. We are still working through these particular problems and should have an answer early tomorrow. If not, our first IGP article (three total) featuring the G45 chipset will go up as is within the next 24 hours or so (9/23 PM update - Intel is trying to resolve several problems tonight, 9/24 update - Intel has a few answers for us, article up later today).

Another major problem that we have had on this board is compatibility with various SATA based BD capable optical drives. In every case, our Intel DG45ID boards have not properly recognized the Sony BDU-X10S. Granted we have had some problems with our ASUS and LITE-ON drives on this board but those have been random. This board absolutely does not like this particular Sony drive. In each case, we updated the board to BIOS 079 and the Sony drive to firmware version 1.0d . Depending on whether we have AHCI or RAID enabled on the board, the drive needs to be attached to SATA port 3 to ensure the system will POST properly. If we select Native IDE, the drive refuses to work properly when attached to any port with our component selections. This drive works perfectly on the ASUS and Gigabyte G45 boards without a firmware update so we think the incompatibility is with the Intel BIOS.

We also have an LG GGC-H20L Optical drive and a Western Digital SE16 640GB HD attached to SATA ports two and one respectively. I have been testing other combinations since last week on this board and have run into an issue where I cannot get the Intel board to properly recognize the Sony drive with our WD eSATA based drive or with a Hitachi 1TB drive installed as the main OS drive. Our choice of port assignments do not make a difference in these two cases. Hopefully we will have a solution for this problem shortly.

Wireless Networking

Wireless networking is one of several ways to connect the computers in your home. It creates a network by sending radio-frequency signals between your computers to share information. In this article, we'll talk about wireless networking and the technology used to make it happen. We'll also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a wireless network.

Wireless networking technologies take the concept of "no new wires" one step further. In a wireless network, all of the computers in your home broadcast their information to one another using radio signals. This can make networking extremely easy, especially if you have computers all over your house. It also makes it a whole lot simpler to move computers around. For example, a laptop with a wireless network card is completely portable throughout the house!

In wireless networking, a peer-to-peer (or point-to-point) wireless network means that each computer can communicate directly with every other computer on the network. But some wireless networks are client/server. They have an access point, which is a wired controller that receives and transmits data to the wireless adapters installed in each computer.

Newest Computer Technology

How do you keep up with the newest computer technology? The cost of purchasing a new Computer Processing Unit (CPU) is quite high and it seems that with new applications there is a constantly growing need for more memory and more computer speed. It often seems that just as a new CPU is introduced it is already becoming obsolete. There is a solution, however, for increasing your computer's processing capabilities and it is not to purchase a new one every 6 months.

Rather, many people choose to overclock the CPUs that they already have-which is a much more cost-effective option in most cases. Clocking refers to the speed at which a computer processes things and is expressed in the number of clock cycles per minute. Overclocking is a means of increasing that number thereby giving added power and efficiency to all of your computer's operations.

This can make a huge difference in your computer's ability to effectively and quickly run games and video-heavy applications. Video editing, in particular, will benefit greatly from overclocking. It is generally agreed that if you are able to increase the speed of your computer by only 10% that you will not really notice any appreciable change in the computer performance. However, you should be able to increase the speed up to 900% with proper overclocking.

Maximum Performance Your Computer

One way to get maximum performance out of your computer is to utilize overclocking. Overclocking is a means of increasing your computer's speed in order to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently. Clocking is the amount of clock cycles a computer goes through per minute as it processes things. Increasing the number of clock cycles per minute makes your computer capable of processing more things concurrently, or concentrate on one task and complete it more quickly.

This is especially beneficial if you are running games or video editing applications. The obvious advantage to overclocking is that you do not constantly have to purchase upgrades. Many people choose to purchase a less expensive computer-processing unit (CPU) and then overclock it rather than buying a newer unit or one with more memory. It is possible to overclock various components dependent upon your purpose.

Some choose to directly overclock the CPU or the RAM (random access memory) while other users prefer to direct their attention to the video card. It is important, if you do choose to overclock your computer to improve performance, that you consult a professional or purchase professional overclocking software to avoid potential problems. Some of these problems can include overheating of your computer unit, shortened life of computer components, system instability and increase noise produced by your computer.

Overheating occurs because as you increase the speed of your computer, you are increasing the rate at which the components work-more clock cycles per minute equals more energy and consequently more heat produced. It is possible to counteract this by using various cooling devices. Getting high-powered fans is one option but will produce a substantial amount of noise. Other cooling options include water-cooling units but it requires some instruction in the proper use of such units. Additionally, because you will be operating the unit outside of the manufacturer's intended operation parameters, you may expect that the computer's lifespan will be shortened somewhat.