Hey all,

 

Short post because the CPU was not good.

 

As we all know, in between now and April 29th, there's pretty much nothing to do for the extreme overclocker since Ivy Bridge will kick ass. So instead, I wanted to see how good a full AMD setup really performed in 3DMark11. Before, I already tested Bulldozer with 4x GTX580, but that ended up in one big LOL/LMAO/ROFL-fest since it could hardly compete with any other similar setup. So, hopes were not that high to begin with. In any case, I started with a simple run on air cooling to check initial performance.

 

I pushed the CPU to 4GHz (small OC) on simple air cooling. The result was mindblowing:

 

(no tesselation tweaking)

 

Very promising start.

 

Without too much stress, we could then pull down the CPU to -180°C and see how high it could clock. Turns out ... not so high. 6150MHz stable through Physics was about the maximum! One core kept bugging in the tests, so ... little we can do about it. With 6G only, it was already quite obvious that this setup wouldn't be doing too well. Anyway, had some fun pushing the NBclk and DRAMclk in physics. 990FXA-UD7 still is my favorite AMD board .

 

Eventually, I ended up around 18.2k (tesselation disabled).

 

 

At 6GHz, this score isn't that bad (for Bulldozer) relatively speaking. 20K wasn't that super-easy with the GTX580s, with 7970s it should be quite possible. But, well, you need a good CPU.

 

Playing with memory and physics is still quite fun, though. I managed a little higher memory clocks through Physics. Should be interesting to see what happens when the memory is under LN2 too!

 

 

 

Hardware used

 

- AMD Phenom FX-8120 (retail)

- GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 (F5 bios)

- 4x Sapphire Radeon HD 7970

- 2x 2GB GSkill Flare

- Coolermaster Silent Pro M 1000W

- Thortech Thunderbolt 1200W

 

Some pictures of the session:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Till the next time!

if one core/module is bad, wouldn't running other ones at higher frequency give a better score?

mm, GT2-GT3 is good for 1100mhz quad. 200-250 fps is exactly what i got with 5.3 sb-e at 1100mhz gpu clocks. its a shame it sucks in the other 4 tests though.