On air
It looks that the soon-to-be-launched AMD 790GX, a new IGP chipset, will definitely be a much better Phenom overclocker. The boards are expected at the end of this month and our sources managed to get a Phenom 9850 from 2.5GHz all the way to 3.4GHz.
It wouldn't be as interesting if they weren't using air cooling and a retail CPU picked up in a store, and we believe that they can get it even faster using water-cooling. The temperature was an acceptable 44°C and they needed 1.55V to make it run at this speed. As you can see, the CPU finished AMD's stability test at 3.4GHz or (17×200).
It looks that AMD engineers led by John Bruno did a great job, and we can simply say that the boards and chipsets are just getting better and better.
Phenom 9860 is available today for €163, and with a new board and such an overclock it can at least challenge Intel’s dual and quad- cores.
