there were three versions of the PhII x4 965be; only one (c3) was easily overclocked... the c2 stepping, both the 95W and 125W models were seriously capped around 3.7ghz. As for 4ghz or higher on the PhII... why?
The PhII was capped by it's hypertransport/northbridge, not the clock speed. Around 3.8ghz Deneb got almost 95% of it's max performance... sure you could clock it higher, but there was almost no gains in performance. And once you got to 4.0ghz the gains in performance just stopped with deneb. You were almost always better off with a lower clock like 3.8ghz and working like hell on overclocking your northbridge/hypertransport AND ram speeds. better ram timings, faster HT/NB, those things gave you much more performance gains then clocking from 3.8 to 4.0 ghz did with deneb. (note: i'm talking about Deneb, Thuban had a little better performance on the memory controller side of things so clock speeds up to 4.2/4.4ghz could still give you some better performance, but past that point thuban hit a similar wall as deneb did)
That said Deneb AND Thuban were pretty sensitive... it was only late in the runs did you find chips that overclocked easily... frankly, I found the PhII to be a really fun chip to overclock because it was so moody 90% of the time... giving you all sorts of headaches sometimes.
logainofhades :
FM2 Athlon cannot even beat Phenom II X4. :lol: A 4.3ghz 750k loses to a 4.0ghz 965 BE in games.
this is sorta true... depends though. When both chips are using the same native instruction sets the PhII will be about 15% faster, clock for clock to a piledriver. Now that's limited of course, as i said earlier, the PhII does not scale linearly with it's overclocks due to a slow memory controller. So up to 3.8-4.0ghz, yes, the PhII will be about 15% faster then Piledriver.
Now then, that's not always the case, the PhII has a limited instruction set it can work with, so there are limited scenarios where it will show such an advantage over piledriver. Furthermore, 15% at 4.0ghz means a piledriver will have to clock up to 4.6ghz to match... which anyone with a piledriver will tell you, is a VERY EASY overclock to achieve... which MOST with a PhII will tell you 4.0ghz is a HARD overclock to achieve (sure a lot of the late run c3 stepping 965be and the 1100Ts could hit 4.0 or higher, but as i pointed out early, atleast for the 965be, there were almost no gains past that point anyway... while the 1100T still saw some diminishing advantage in performance up to around 4.4ghz)
Having moved from a quad core PhII x4 965be (clocked to 4.0ghz) to a FX 8320 I could tell the difference the 4 more cores and advanced instruction sets made with piledriver BEFORE i even overclocked the cpu (same ram, video card and motherboard as the prior system). It wasn't a huge difference but there definitely was an improvement across the board with multitasking, a number of other tasks. Once i had it clocked up past 4.6ghz it was in a different world from that old deneb. The 8 core fx at 5.0ghz is basically indistinguishable from any high end Intel system I've had my hands on (frankly around 4.8ghz i stopped being able to tell the difference)... heck... to tell you the truth, though the fx is a pretty significant step forward in some ways, it's no where near as impressive a gain adding an SSD did for me.
btw: sign me up as an advocate of MOAR CORZ! My early experience with other people's piledrivers (systems i built and the like) kept me from experiencing the advantage more cores can give you like taking a computer i was intimately familiar with (a quad core phII) and replacing a single part (the quad core for a octo core fx) and seeing just how much snappier and quicker everything got on the spot even though rationally i KNOW a fx 8320 at stock is SLOWER a PhIIx4 965be at stock... let alone overclocked. The lone advantage that fx8320 had over the overclocked phII was twice the cores... and damn did it show right off the bat.
Its for that reason, that if i chose to go and get an intel in the future (since it looks like amd has completely abandoned the performance market this year) I refuse to get anything less then an 8 core intel...
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