8GHz Not Hard to Reach with AMD FX-8150 Says Overclocker

Expected to arrive in just a few hours from now, AMD's upcoming FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture seem to feature an impressive overclocking potential according to an enthusiast who recently stated that 8GHz is easy to reach using the upcoming FX-8150 CPU.

“8GHz on 990FXA-UD7, not hard to reach without cherry pick CPU, LN2 Cooled -192°C,” said Hicookie, Gigabyte's in-house overclocker, who also helped the company develop the X58A-OC motherboard.

Of course that “not hard to reach” for an extreme enthusiast such as Hicookie doesn't mean the same as for the rest of us, since as one can clearly see the AMD processor was actually cooled using liquid nitrogen which has a boiling point of -192°C.

This sort of cooling was required for the CPU in order to allow the overclocker to raise the voltage of the chip all the way to an impressive 2V.

Thanks to this vCore the FX-8150 was able to reach 8,030MHz with a bus speed of 292MHz.

To put things in perspective, the eight-core AMD flagship processor used by Hicookie has a base clock of 3.6GHz and a maximum Turbo Core frequency of 4.2GHz, so this translates into a 130% core speed increase over the chip's stock settings.

The rest of the system used for this overclock was comprised out of a high-end Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 system memory and an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. Only two out of the eight computing cores were active during this experiment.

The highest frequency achieved to date by an FX-8150 processor was reached in mid-September when the CPU reached an impressive 8,429MHz. 

Liquid helium was used for that overclock and the CPU used has become the the world fastest clocked processor, surpassing by 120MHz the previous world record. (via Gigabyte Tech Daily)

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