I finally got it. My AMD Phenom II 940 quad core processor arrived yesterday! I was so excited to receive it I almost couldn’t contain myself. However I had to at least for a short while because I had to drive the family around for an errand. But as soon as we got home and were fed by golly I installed that sucker just as fast as I could.

Now this article/post/entry is going to serve a couple purposes tonight. For one it’s going to highlight some tips for some things to watch out for when you do your own processor upgrades as I ran into some trouble. Also, I have done some research and have in fact overclocked my very overclock-able new processor. I could not afford to purchase an upgraded cooling device so I just wanted to see how far I could get with the stock fan that comes with it. Yes, retail AMD processors apparently once again are shipping with CPU fans. Everyone on-line says they are junk but I am having decent luck with mine this far.

So the first step to installing a new CPU and having it work is to make sure that your motherboard supports said CPU. Mine did, however only in a BIOS revision that I didn’t catch back in December. So before I even installed it I flashed my BIOS to the latest version. Unfortunately, part of this process cost me a pretty hefty price. After I installed the new processor and the DMI updated, I forgot to go back in and re-enable my raid controller (for some reason it’s off by default.) So apparently when my motherboard updated it’s DMI information and attempted to boot, it somehow overwote the MBR on one of my primary hard drives. All of a sudden it was no longer a member of my Raid Array. And in a 0 Strip Raid, there is no “repair”. I had no choice but to reinialize the drives and rebuild the array thus causing me to have to start over from scratch with my entire Vista install. I was not happy. However, thanks to my zippy new processor and there is a very noticable difference, Vista installed in about a half hour and I was able to get most of my utilities and apps reinstalled very quickly considering I was running a ton of Windows Updates at the same time. All in all, I was back to fully operational, minus my games and data of course, by about 11pm and I started the operation at 7pm. I was even able to start downloading my steam games which I let download and install overnight. So it wasn’t a total loss.

So tonight I got the itch. I did buy a Black Edition processor after all and the Phenom II 940 is supposed to be one of the most overclock-able processors of all time. While running benchmarks last night I saw submits from people with them clocked anywhere from stock at 3.0GHz all the way up to an incredible 6GHz! Granted I’m not into water cooling or buying $100 fans but I figured I had such an easy time overclocking my X2 Black Edition 300 MHz with no issues that I thought I should try it out with the new one. Boy I’ll tell ya it was not as easy or as quick as I thought it’d be.

The number one issue I ran into was misinformation. I downloaded a program called “Everest“. This is a benchmarking utility that also includes a stability test. Well as part of this stability test there is a temp monitor. After much research I learned that the absolute top temperature that a 940 can take is 62 degrees Celsius.  While running this stability test at various speeds to check for stability and temperature safety, I was scared off by rapidly rising temps that approached 60 degrees in a matter of 2 minutes or less. After being discouraged and clocking it back down (and suffering through some weird BIOS error and recovery process that set me back several BIOS versions) I did a little more research. I discovered a whole host of complaints in different forums regarding the inaccuracy of Everest’s temperature monitoring. So I decided to check for myself. I went back into my BIOS and set my processor up for 3.4GHz which is the maximum I feel I can run it at with the cooling solution I have considering the voltage jump required.

After getting my processor set at the speed I wanted it at: Multiplier of 17 instead of 15 which is pretty much the only change I made since I left my voltage on auto so the mainboard can decide how much it needs. I booted into Windows just fine as before, only this time instead of going right for the stability test I downloaded Gigabytes Easy Tuner 6 from their support downloads. An older version of this application came with my motherboard so I knew it’s capabilities before I downloaded. This program (amongst other things which I don’t use it for) has a “hardware monitor” interface that reads directly from your Gigabyte motherboards BIOS. So you are getting the actual temperature being reported by the motherboard itself directly. I left this monitoring application open and then proceeded to run Everest. After a couple minutes, Everest was reporting my temp to be near 70 degrees whilst my BIOS was only reporting it to be 51 degrees… which is well within tolerances and this was under 100% CPU load. To make it count, I left that stability program hammering my CPU at 100% for 20 minutes while closely monitoring the temperature. Every CPU has a threshold or a maximum temperature that it will reach under normal circumstances (IE not in a 100 degree room or shoved in a cabinet). I wanted to make sure that 51 degrees was going to be that threshold and sure enough it never went higher. In fact, it even dropped back down to 50 degrees a few times which tells me this is where the cooler is going to keep that processor while it’s under load. So basically… SUCCESS. My stock 3.0GHz Phenom is now a 3.4GHz phenom at no extra charge.

 

 

 

So this is how I ended up with this…

 

So I would like to thanks Tom’s Hardware for their article on their own overclocking experience as it helped give me the courage and the guidance to make this attempt. Also all you random tech forum question askers and especially those those that answer those questions. A lot of us looked to your advice for answers for our own burning questions. The internet is one of my best resources for information on hard to reach little nuggets of information that make the difference.

 

Also I want to stay that though I’ve only had it for slightly more than 24 hours now, I do love this new quad core processor of mine. Even at stock speeds it was incredibly zippy and noticably faster in navigating through Vista and launching and installing applications. I went from 2 cores at 2.9GHz on a larger 65nm die up to 4 cores at 3.4GHz on a 45nm die with a ton more cache and an integrated memory controller on it. The difference is phenominally… Hmm… Phenom… Phenominal… who knows.