The INQ overclocks AMD bar bill

AMD HELD A CHARITY OVERCLOCKING EVENING in a London hostelry recently, to celebrate the launch of its 955 Phenom 2 black edition processor.

The processor is unlocked and the firm is hyping the fact that the chip can run at higher than it's factory-set frequency. It therefore invited a selection of London-based hackery to fiddle about with AMD-powered systems built specially for the purpose.

The water-cooled mini Dragon PCs were knocked up by Roy Goodenough of PC Pitstop of Hove. And, since the INQ team consisted of one hack with a pen whereas some teams  consisted of about six hacks with a tookit and their own fans, Goodenough was seconded to the INQ as technical assistant for the evening.

The event, on 23rd April, in the Glassblower pub in Piccadilly, gave us the chance to  catch up with the "nicest guy in IT", Andrew Buxton who is now AMD's UK MD, along with European channel marketing manager Richard Baker who explains on cemera what the event is all about.

The overclocking competition was refereed by AMD's chief overclocker Sami Mäkinen, and demanded a top CPUZ score, which we went after using AMD's own overlocking software, concentrating on gradually raising the speed of a single core and tweaking the voltages across the system.

As the room heated up, and the ecosystem creaked, our attempt to move the system next to an open window was thwarted and we scrambled to a second place finish, with a CPUZ clocked score of 4.11GHz.

We gave up on getting a decent 3dmark 05 score, as we were close to the bar.

The mini systems featured a DFI AM3 motherboard, quad-core 955 Phenom 2 black edition processor and XFX 4890 graphics card.

The INQUIRER retirement fund was the unregistered charity that failed to benefit from the £2,000 prize money stumped up by AMD and XFX between them. µ