3800+ EE Not a Good Overclocker???

[TheRyuu]

Text

Thats the overclocking page in a review of the EE X2 3800+.

Take a look. Maby it's not the magical overclocker we were all looking for. You think Techreport got a bad sample?

As for the EE SFF, well, it's a bit different story. AMD tweaks its manufacturing process in certain ways to make these low-power processors, and as I understand it, they are engaging in a tradeoff between transistor leakage and switching speed when they do so. As a result, the EE SFF is able to run with very low core voltages, but it's not happy at high clock speeds. I was hoping to get it to 2.4GHz, which is the speed at which I run a much older Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in my own system, but the EE SFF wouldn't POST at that speed. After some experimenting, I was able to get it stable at 2.33GHz (on a 233MHz HyperTransport link) with a minor bump in voltage. Even then, the system wouldn't POST reliably, but it was stable enough to run a few tests. The system's DDR2 memory was running at an effective 776MHz clock speed in this config, with PCI Express locked at 100MHz.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Interesting perspective, though the reviewer seemed reluctant to overvolt the chip the way we'd all want him to do it. The whole point of a lv/ulv chip is to run it at the same stock voltage of a non-lv/ulv chip from the same process (i.e. 90nm X2-3800+) to see what kind of headroom it had at that point. Granted, seeing as how the stock power consumption of the X2-3800+ EE SFF chip is so close to the stock power consumption of the E6300, it makes sense for him to not want to raise vcore on the X2 EE SFF chip too much.

Something tells me the 35W X2-3800+ EE SFF doesn't OC any better than normal X2s.

 

[RichUK]

See this is what i said before about AMD using low leakage transistors, and thus meaning the 3800+ EE will not be the dream overclocker that many once thought. Its pretty much the same thing with Turons, but no one believed me. Meh.

 

[formulav8]

AMD is apparently using the slower transistors as used in the Turion models. In the end, the slower transistors will use less power, but will not be able to do the higher speeds.



Jason

 

[DrMrLordX]

Well Rich you were right, but some of us wanted to see the chip overclocked anyway to make sure. It took so damn long for anyone to actually overclock one . . .

 

[n7]

I don't think anyone cares now that we have E6300s running around wild :evil: