Overclock 1100t: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Overclock?

90,000 more gunpowder… GECID.com. Page 1

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> AMD Phenom II X6 1100T BE gaming test in 2020: there’s still gunpowder…

06/25/2020

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This is already the fourth and, most likely, the last article on the Socket AM3 platform this year. In the previous ones, we evaluated the possibility of running current and not very games on 3-core and 4-core representatives of the Athlon II and Phenom II lines. Now it’s time to test the flagship 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition .

If the first 4-core Phenoms for AM3 appeared at the beginning of 2009, then the release of the top 6-core Phenom had to wait almost 2 years — until December 2010. It is based on a 45nm Thuban die with a base frequency of 3300MHz, dynamic overclocking to 3700MHz, and 6MB of L3 cache with a 125W TDP.

Integrated RAM controller supports DDR2-1066 and DDR3-1333 modules in 2-channel mode. There is still no support for SSE4.1 and higher instructions, so some games could not be launched, but more on that later.

Now a few words about the test bench. It is based on the ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer motherboard, designed for Socket AM3+, but working perfectly with AM3 chips.

16 GB of RAM in 2-channel mode was enough for the tests. Used kit series G.SKILL TridentX . In nominal terms, it worked with a frequency of 1333 MHz and timings of 9-9-9-24.

We planned to overclock the processor, and immediately stocked up with a beautiful, efficient and almost quiet 2-section dropsy Cougar AQUA 240 . It was beautiful and efficient right out of the box thanks to the bright RGB lighting on the waterblock and a pair of 120mm fans. But you can’t call it quiet from the start, but by simple manipulations in the BIOS, you can reduce the speed to the region of 1200-1300 rpm so that it does not disturb your acoustic comfort.

The operating system, benchmarks, games and all other necessary programs fit on a pair of terabyte SSD PATRIOT P200 .

We have one requirement for a video card — not to limit the potential of the processor. Under this condition, the Palit GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GameRock is perfect. The TU104-450 GPU can run any games in Full HD even without factory overclocking, and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory reduces the load on RAM in optimized projects.

The power calculator shows that a quality 650W power supply is optimal for such a system. This is exactly what we looked after from the very beginning — this is Seasonic FOCUS PX-650 with 80PLUS Platinum certification. Japanese capacitors, modern circuitry, reliable fan, 10-year warranty, a full list of protections, modular cables — and this is not the whole list of its advantages.

All components fit quickly and easily into the RIOTORO CR1288TG Full Tower. In addition to spaciousness and LED-backlight, it pleases with good ventilation. Most of the panels are littered with perforations, and the package includes two 140mm fans for the front and one 120mm for the back.

Monitor Philips Brilliance 329P9H helped with displaying the image. And an external system with AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K coped with recording gameplay without loss of performance.

First of all, first of all, overclocking, but we’ll leave the games for later! True, the result was not very high. The stable operation of the processor was achieved at a frequency of 3960 MHz. To do this, we raised the system bus frequency by 40 MHz, simultaneously increasing the CPU Voltage, the frequency of the north bridge, and a number of other parameters. RAM was accelerated to 1600 MHz.

In this mode, there was not the slightest hint of throttling or stability issues when passing the AIDA64 stress test. The maximum temperature of the processor cores rose to 53°C. True, the cooling system was noisy, but in games it was easier.

On the spot, we ran several synthetic benchmarks to compare performance gains. Read, write and copy data operations using RAM have accelerated by 9-13% according to AIDA64 . Access latency decreased by 16%.

The increase in CineBench R15 was about 20%. If in nominal value the test Phenom II slightly outperforms the Ryzen 3 1200, then after overclocking it is already ahead of the Ryzen 3 2200G and is approaching the Core i3-8100. This is the grandfather of the grandchildren punished!

The CPU-Z reports an 8% and 20% bonus for single and multi-threaded mode, although this did not really affect the results of the comparison with the A10-7850K APU.

We are getting closer to the gaming test, from which we are separated by the last step — comparison in benchmarks. World of Tanks EnCore RT felt overclocked and increased the results by a maximum of 43%. As a result, you can try your luck with a higher quality preset, which we did next.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider the bonus was at the same level — a maximum of 44%. This allowed the statistics of rare and very rare events to leave the danger zone below 24 FPS.

In Gears 5 , the increase was the lowest — up to 25%, but even with it we get a more stable and smooth video sequence, with a margin for difficult locations.

Overall, overclocking improves system performance by 30%. This is very important and useful for such an ancient model, because every FPS counts.

That’s it, the aperitif is over — let’s move on to the main course! Some games started well on the 4-core AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE, so we decided to skip them.

Dota 2 at maximum quality settings was slightly lag — I had to go down a step back to the high preset. The average speed rose above 80 fps, and in the column 0.1% Low below 25 FPS was not seen. Nothing disturbed the comfort of the gameplay.

In War Thunder , you can immediately select a high preset and go into battle for the scalps of opponents, although along the way you can lose your own — it’s already how lucky. In technical terms, there were no problems, there was not even a smell of friezes and jamming.

In World of Tanks , at a high preset, statistics are lower than in Tundra, especially for rare and very rare events, but it is still comfortable to play even on a light tank. Perhaps someone will not be satisfied with about 30 FPS in the column of very rare events. In this case, there is an average profile.

AMD Phenom II X4 975 and X6 1100T processors

Recently, AMD fans (and just people who follow this market) have been most interested in the future generation of AMD processors, codenamed Bulldozer. There are still a few months left before their release, but these chips are waiting in a way that no one has been waiting for for a long time. Many believe that AMD will be able to make a real breakthrough and return to the high-performance mainstream CPU market, where Intel has long dominated almost unconditionally. Especially since fate recently played a cruel joke on the latter, and the triumphant start of the new architecture turned out to be something like a false start: a bug was discovered in the chipsets for this processor family, which led to their recall. Of course, in the long run, this will not change anything significantly (and in some cases “defective” chips can be used, so not everyone will change them), but the spread of the new platform will certainly delay, which works into the hands of a competitor. The main thing — «do not jinx it.»

Moreover, the situation with Phenom is still fresh in the memory of many, which was also very much expected, but we had to wait a little longer. Optimists may object that the score in this game is still in AMD’s favor, since the Athlon (K7) and Athlon 64 (K8) released within the equally tough time pressure turned out to be very successful processors, however … It took them a long time to demonstrate their heroic strength 🙂 Athlon had to go through a design change and change the core and a couple of technical processes before it really shined. And the first Athlon 64s only caught up, but did not overtake the competitors from the Intel camp — and only when the latter ruined her own life, trying (in Prescott) at the same time to master the process 90 nm, and tweak the architecture, it became possible to talk about the unequivocal advantage of the AMD product (by the way, it also managed to change the socket by that time, by tradition). From this point of view, Phenom was not so unsuccessful either: after changing the manufacturing process and redesigning the chip, it turned out to be a good processor. But not at once. In general, Bulldozer also runs the risk of being a good processor, but not good enough, given the advances given to it. After that, as often happens, its most active supporters are the first to migrate to the camp of opponents — unsatisfied expectations often do other things to people.

However, how the situation will develop after the release of new processors, it will be clear only after they are released 🙂 And until that moment, as we have already said, there is quite a lot of time left. Therefore, for now AMD has to sell what it already has, gradually «squeezing out» the last juices from Phenom II. And also to carry out other optimization measures, some of which we cannot welcome. For example, the development of the Athlon II X4 family has recently come to an end: the Athlon II X4 645 we studied in the fall will remain the top model in it. 3.2 GHz, but the resulting product was called not Athlon II X4 650, which would be logical, but … Phenom II X4 840. An extremely dubious renaming, since earlier the 800 series differed from 900th only with a reduced amount of cache memory in the third level, but not its complete absence.

Moreover, it is not entirely clear how this processor will coexist with the Phenom II X3 740, which is still on sale (albeit discontinued along with other such models that do not belong to the energy-efficient family), slightly higher frequency and the fourth core is not in all applications will compensate for the lack of L3 cache. In particular, in our recent testing, the Phenom II X3 740 slightly outperformed the Athlon II X4 645 even in the totality of gaming tests, and in some of them did whatever he wanted with it 🙂 And in general, processors with the name Phenom without L3 cache never existed before. And now you have what you want (although not all are on sale): completely without (freshly baked 850), with 2 MiB (first Phenom), 4 MiB (old Phenom II X4 800) and 6 MiB (all other Phenom II) .

But let’s leave such renaming on the conscience of the company — today we are still not talking about this (albeit extremely interesting to many) price segment, but about the «tops», where everything is quite predictable. Phenom II X6 1100T appeared at the end of last year, Phenom II X4 975 — at the very beginning of this year, but both of them were a bit late for our last test of high-performance processors (dedicated, as you might guess, to the debut of the LGA1155 platform). Thus, we will get acquainted with their performance today. But not only with it — in the end, an increase in the clock frequency by only 100 MHz cannot give any «wonderful discoveries», so we decided to make the article more interesting, including for those who plan to purchase some other than those indicated CPU.

The only thing left to notice is that the company still has some reserve to increase the productivity of old lines. In particular, we managed to overclock one and the other processor to frequencies noticeably higher than 4 GHz, and the frequency of the “north bridge” (i.e., the memory controller and the third-level cache) turned out to be increased by as much as 1.3 times — up to 2, 6 GHz.

And for this we didn’t have to go to any extreme measures, such as using liquid nitrogen (and indeed anything liquid): an ordinary high-quality cooler, increasing the voltage of the cores by about 0, 2V and NB to 1. 4V and that’s it. There is even a suspicion that stability would have been preserved even at lower voltages, but we didn’t carry out too deep a check — it’s not our topic (and, in the end, only running a large amount of complex software, and not so popular in everyday life, can give full confidence only stress tests or games). But in general, it is clear that the once-targeted frequency of 4 GHz is not unattainable. However, in order for such frequencies to become commonplace for mass-produced processors (with manufacturer-guaranteed performance), a lot of work needs to be done. In the meantime, AMD is increasing the frequencies in small steps, which, frankly, is somewhat insufficient. 3.5 3.6 3.2/3.6 3.3/3.7 Starting multiplication coefficient 17.5 18

90IT 5 Turbo Core — — 3-3-3-0-0-0 3-3-3-0-0-0 901 computation threads 4/4 4/4 6/6 6/6 L1 cache, I/D, KB

The main heroes of today’s article will certainly be AMD processors, and, as usual with such updates to the model range, a direct comparison of the results in pairs 970-975 and 1090T-1100T is mandatory. By the way, we tested the 1090T a long time ago — there is a hope that since then the motherboard manufacturers have «twisted» their firmware, so that we will be able to see super-linear growth. But we can see that it is not up to linear: after all, the performance of the memory subsystem has not changed, so where it is important, an increase in the clock frequency of the cores begins to have less and less importance. 9650 as the fastest in this family (except for extreme ones), but this very expensive processor has practically disappeared from sale. I had to stop at the Q9500 — far from being the slowest model, and standing at the level of some other heroes of today’s article.

GIGABYTE P67A-UD5 (P67)

Although we planned to completely abandon the use of DDR2 memory in tests, we decided to make an exception for LGA775. First, we have already established that the use of DDR3 only reduces the results of processors for this platform. Secondly, although the prices of these types of memory have already become equal, few people will now purchase a «middle class» system based on LGA775. The results of these processors are most interesting to those who either already have a computer on one of them and are considering switching to another platform, or those who are planning to upgrade from a slower Core 2. Well, in both of these cases, DDR2 memory is most likely to be used. in the «starter» system, so we chose it for the test bench.

Testing

Processor performance testing methodology (list of software used and testing conditions) is described in detail in a separate article. For ease of perception, the results on the diagrams are presented in percentages (the result of AMD Athlon II X4 620 is taken as 100% in each of the tests). Detailed results in absolute terms are available as a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format.

3D visualization

In this traditionally low-threaded group, the Core i5-2300 turned out to be the fastest, which there were no doubts from the very beginning 🙂 Phenom II X4 is faster than Phenom II X6 due to the higher frequency, which is also not surprising. More importantly, due to its increase 9The 75 managed to overtake the i5-760 (which was at the level of 970) and get closer to the i7-870. Yes, and 1100T received a good increase, which allowed him to keep up with the i5-760. However, we repeat once again, visualization is a low-threaded task, so it is not capable of “loading” four- and, especially, six-core processors with work.

3D rendering

What can not be said about the final miscalculation! Phenom II X6 processors, of course, still “do not reach” the level of Core i7, but they easily bypass Core i5 without straining. The Phenom II X4 is not capable of such feats, but still not bad — the first models could hardly compete with the Core 2 Quad, and now it is not a rival for them at all (at comparable prices).

Scientific and engineering calculations

Again we return to the sinful low-flow earth, so the results are very similar to those obtained in the first group. True, there is one multi-threaded subtest here, which allows the Phenom II X6 to «keep up» with the Phenom II X4, but it is not enough to keep up with the Core i5-2300. However, even the Core i7-870 fails to do this, which, nevertheless, «climbed» to second place.

Graphic editors

There is some benefit from increasing the number of computation threads, but mainly due to Adobe Photoshop, which has some (but far from complete) optimization. The position of today’s main heroes is traditional: a slight increase in clock frequency slightly increases performance compared to its predecessors (the reverse would be strange), but does not radically change the overall balance of power.

Archivers

The same can be said about this group. However, with one exception: as you can see, earlier all AMD processors lagged behind the Core i5-760 here, but now the Phenom II X6 1100T managed to overtake it. But that’s all — the Core i5-2300, despite the same clock speed and reduced cache capacity, remains out of reach.

Compilation

Here, the number of computation threads (or better, physical cores), cache memory capacity, and clock frequency are already important, so Phenom II X4 975 is able to outperform the Core i5-2300, and the Phenom II X6 1100T is only slightly behind the Core i7-870 (while the previous model with the 1090T index was only on par with the slower Core i7-860).

Java

The test preferences are almost the same except for the cache memory, and the Java machine has always been good with the AMD processor architecture, but this does not help much in competition with processors with the Sandy Bridge architecture. However, the 1100T at least outperforms all Core i5s, including the new ones (but 1090T lagged behind the Core i5-2500). Well, against the background of old (not to mention «very» old) Intel processors, all the older Phenom II look very good.

Internet browsers

Previously, Phenom II X4 were the best in this group, then they had to give way to older models under LGA1155, but the new 975 turned out to be extremely close to them. There is nothing to say about Intel processors based on older architectures. Although, in general, as we have said more than once, the results of these tests for all processors, except for the most budget modifications, are not so important — they all do the job quite quickly, and the difference between browsers far overlaps the difference between even the fastest and slowest processors.

Audio encoding

The frontal approach to parallelization (we run simultaneous encoding of such a number of files that corresponds to the number of hardware-supported computation threads) leads to the fact that all processors are divided into three groups: performing 8, 6 and 4 computation threads, and almost no matter how many physical cores there are. The only exception is Sandy Bridge, however, since we took the youngest quad-core model, it could not spoil the general trend for us very much 🙂 The most curious result here is, perhaps, the result of the Core 2 Quad Q9500 is its finest hour: it managed to stay at the level of the Core i5-760 and Phenom II X4 970. So it is very possible that the increased efficiency of Sandy Bridge is due to the fact that Turbo Boost 2.0 began to work adequately in this group of applications, which could not wait from the previous version of the technology.

Video encoding

But these applications already «decide» how much resources they use, so the Phenom II X6 is quite capable of competing with the old Core i7. The new ones (more precisely, the «new» — i7-2600 is still one, albeit in two modifications) are faster, however, we tend to regard this result positively. But the increase itself is small, which led to a curious effect — Phenom II X4 970 and 975 (which also outperformed their former competitor in the face of the Core i5-760) showed … the same overall result. However, nothing surprising: the increase in clock frequency was less than 3%, the increase in performance, respectively, is also no more than 3% in the most ideal case. Now we take into account the inevitable measurement error, the rules of rounding and averaging, etc. In general, what are we talking about? Moreover, the step of 100 MHz between neighboring models is actually too small. Even if they ask for only a couple of dollars “on top”, there is reason to doubt the expediency of overpaying, but AMD wants as much as $ 20 in bulk. So decide after that — is there any point in paying so much, if even in tests it is sometimes impossible to see the difference between neighboring models, and even between the more distant ones in the price list, it is not always noticeable. In tests. In practical use, even more so.

Games

Traditionally boring section 🙂 All modern processors differ slightly from each other in terms of gaming performance, so we can talk about something only when studying their budget (less than 100 dollars) modifications. Of course, one can object that the Radeon HD 5870 (which we use in tests) is no longer the fastest solution on the market, so if you take something more powerful, and even lower the resolution and worsen the image quality, the difference will be more pronounced. embossed, however … Most are still interested in the gameplay, and not the pursuit of abstract numbers. Monitors with Full HD resolution and even higher are now cheap, so the 1680×1050 pixels we chose can be considered insufficient, not excessive. Video cards with lower performance are not only present in mass quantities in users’ computers, but they are also being sold, and even being developed now (and will continue in the near future). In general, we can once again repeat that in the first place for a gaming computer (if we talk about 3D games, of course, and not about browser-based online) is a video card. The second is the video card. And on the third is also a video card. Especially if you already have a processor that costs $200, even if it’s not new.

Total

In the final table of ranks, four AMD processors lined up as expected from the point of view of everyday everyday logic and common sense beat the Core i5-2300 as well: a pyrrhic victory, but still. More importantly, in tests where the potential capabilities of multi-core processors are fully used, the new top AMD is able to compete with the Core i7 of the «old» architecture (for LGA1366 and LGA1156). What’s more, the Phenom II X6 1100T can even outperform the Core i7-870 in at least two groups. But we, perhaps, will not rush to rejoice at this fact, as well as the greater potential flexibility of AM3: the possibility of using multi-core processors with integrated graphics; «full-fledged» PCIe 2.0 not only for video cards, but also for peripherals; the availability of boards with a couple of slots for video cards with a «full» x16 width (mainly, of course, designed to support several video cards based on AMD chips, but for aesthetes, there are also products on sale based on NVIDIA chipsets that support SLI, and sometimes Triple-SLI) .

All this is true. However, in terms of processor performance, this beauty is negated by the fact that the Core i7-870 is far from the fastest Intel processor: in addition to it, there are also 2600, 880, 960, 970, 980X and 990X in the line. It can be argued that all but the first belong to completely different price classes. However, the causal relationship here is different: they cost so much because they have no one to compete with. Simply because the Phenom II X6 1100T is AMD’s fastest desktop processor, and all of the six (some of which predated even any six-core AMD processors) were faster. Therefore, a buyer who is not satisfied with the performance level of the junior Core i7 and the older Phenom II X6 simply has nowhere to go — he can choose either one Intel processor or … another Intel processor. And it is impossible to radically change this situation by adding 100 MHz every six months. We need new, significantly faster AMD processors! And everyone needs it, including fans of Intel products, and, by and large, this company itself too.

As for our out-of-competition hero in the form of the Core 2 Quad Q9500, its results speak for themselves: it is about 15% slower than the Core i5-760, and 25% slower than the Core i5-2300, although the starting clock speeds of these processors are similar. Here you can evaluate them in different ways 🙂 On the one hand, it’s not so bad, on the other hand, it’s not even the cheapest out of this trio. Of course, pricing is in the hands of the manufacturer, which can specifically reduce the attractiveness of old processors in order to promote new ones, but the cost of Core 2 Quad is objectively high. (If only because of a few megabytes of full-speed L2 cache: in 760 L3 operates at a lower frequency, while 2300 is manufactured using a finer process, which positively affects the cost of production.) Of course, Q9500 is not the fastest member of the family, but it is also far from the slowest: there are actually only two models higher than it in the «table of ranks» (moreover, the performance of one of them, as we already established a year ago, is literally 2-3% higher), but below — as many as three representatives of the Q9000 line and another three Q8000. Of course, it doesn’t follow from the above that all these processors should be unconditionally sold in a hurry — they are not that slow (especially the same Q9500 and its twin brother Q9505). But here on the idea of ​​buying a new of a productive computer on the LGA775 platform, this finally puts an end to it.