Overclocking
We've historically seen that AMD Phenom II X6 chips run just past 4GHz when kept in check with a moderate heatsink-and-fan unit - we use an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro PWM. Disabling the Turbo CORE setting while keeping the multiplier at the default 16.5x, we increased the speed of the chip by ramping up the HTT clock. Using the Windows-based AMD's OverDrive software and putting 1.375V through the sample chip, we hit 4.125GHz (250MHz HTT).Here's how it played out in the CPU-intensive video-encoding and rendering tests.
The graphs show that an overclocked AMD Phenom II X6 1100T cements its position as the second-best CPU in this line-up. What's also clear is that AMD cannot catch Intel's six-core chips without a fundamental change in architecture. That said, the overclocked performance is pretty tasty for a £200 chip, though.
