AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition – Luck of the Draw

Overclocking Results

Our preconceived idea of the Black Edition Phenom CPU was that it would just be an absolute killer overclocker. We figured that by either manipulating the multiplier or the HTT, we would be able to get good overclocks and be able to dial in the perfect settings for our particular rig. After all, that is what we have done in the past with other CPUs from Intel and AMD, so why would this be any different? But it was. The Phenom CPU is very sensitive to high bus settings. VERY sensitive in deed!

We started our overclocking by using the stock multiplier, which is 11.5, and raising the HTT until we just could not do anything with it. And that was not long. We had to raise the vcore to even get passed 210HTT. All in all, we got up to 220HTT, but had to raise he vcore to 1.55v to get there. I was actually astonished, frustrated, and ready to add the CPU to my keychain. So, here is a couple pics of our best… 220HTT!

I frustratingly made a call to Nate about this, and he confirmed what I had been able to test, that Phenom was high-bus sensitive. He suggested that I leave the HTT alone and just raise the multiplier to see if it would go higher. At the setting of 200HTT, I was able to use a 13x multiplier, which gave me a total CPU speed of 2.6Ghz. That was it. That was as far as I could go, and I am not even sure I could call that stable because it could run most things, but never could finish the SuperPi 32m test.

Overclocking is never a guarantee. So it is hard to complain about any extra uuumph that you get out of a CPU. 230Mhz more did make a difference in our testing results. Lets take a quick look at a few tests we ran.