Overclocking
Before I get to show you any screenshots, I have to come out and say that the Phenom 9600 Black Edition is easily one of the more difficult experiences I have had with overclocking. Pushing a CPU past its imposed limits is by no means a cake walk, and nor should it be. That being said, I had to put in a great deal of time and testing for what amounted to very little gain on a part specifically designed for overclocking. I could revel in hyperbole all day, but I think I need to show you screenshot of my final overclock to really get the point across.
For the dozen or so hours I put into tweaking, poking, and proding this system, I managed to only squeeze an additional 200MHz out of the Phenom 9600 Black Edition. I tried every voltage setting, most combinations of voltage settings, and even tried using the BIOS. Still nothing could appease the processing gods. 2.5GHz was the speed limit I was going to experience. Now some other sites have reported 2.6GHz before hitting a wall, a couple have hit 2.8GHz, and one hit what is a very dubious 3.0GHz. But not me. If I tried clocking the Phenom 9600 Black Edition up just 100MHz more, and even if I added some extra voltage, the second I hit Apply the system hard froze on me and I had to restart.
So onward I marched. I decided to benchmark the processor with the TLB fix disabled and enabled, to compare the performance hit. I also tested the Phenom while overclocked to see if in this day and age of nearly GHz overclocks a simple 200MHz boost made a difference. The overclocked tests also had the TLB erratum fix disabled, so as to get the maximum performance out of the processors. Let’s hope we can an 8% performance increase out of our 8% overclock.
Synthetic Benchmarks
For our first round of tests we turned to the synthetic benchmarking suites available from Futuremark, and the first suite we loaded up was PCMark05. Though somewhat long in the tooth, this suite of tests can still put many systems through their paces. Futuremark has also released a couple of patches to ensure PCMark05 can take full advantage of all available cores.
Like its much better known cousin, 3DMark2006, PCMark05 compiles its score from a slew of system tests designed to emulate standard desktop usage. These tests include processing, hard drive usage, memory, web page rendering, and some limited 3D. For this review we also ran all the CPU specific tests, which generated it’s own CPU specific composite score.
The results pretty well followed the curve I was expecting. Enabling the TLB erratum fix resulted in a performance hit, and the overclock resulted in a performance increase. Using the stock clock with TLB fix disabled as the zero point, as well as some quick maths, we can calculate that overclocking our Phenom resulted in a 5% performance increase overall, and 9% when the CPU is isolated. With the same maths we find that the TLB erratum fix caused a 2% decrease in performance overall, and a statistically insignificant drop with the CPU isolated. Moving along.
3DMark is like PCMark in that it generates a composite score based on several measures of performance. For a really good description, I’m going to copy and paste from the 3DMark Wikipedia article.
“The measurement unit 3DMark is intended to give a normalized mean for comparing different visual processing units, which proponents assert is indicative of end-user performance capabilities. Critics counter by stating that it is a synthetic measure of real-world performance.”
3DMark06 is the latest version of this testing suite, and although synthetic in nature it still provides a fairly consistent scale by which to measure system performance. For our tests we ran the benchmark at default settings to see what numbers we could eke out. In the case of our Phenom 9600 Black Edition we see what is going to be a trend through this review. While overclocked, we only saw a 5% performance increase from our test CPU. As for enabling the TLB erratum fix, when the dust settled that resulted in a 7% perform decrease.
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