Overclocking AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb at 4.2ghz using stock voltage

[Manthan G]

I am having AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz. I overclocked the processor to 4.2ghz at 1.5 voltage and hence I concluded I am having great CPU. However while searching on internet I came to know that someone has managed to overclock the processor to 4.2ghz on 1.35 volts only. Even overclocked CPU was stable as well. Tell me whether the thing which I have mentioned over here is true?

[AshritaS]

Well the Northbridge speed could be contradictory what you are thinking. It simply gives the most performance benefit to your cpu. For eg 4GHz with 2GHz Northbridge speed could be surpassed by 3.6GHz where 2.8GHz on the Northbridge. Better thing is that you should raise both of them as much possible. In simple terms I wanted to tell you that CPU-NB clock speed would give you better performance gain rather than that of the raw clockspeed on your CPU cores. Also Deneb seems to be better than AMD's Six-Core Thubans in terms of Overclocking. I noticed that most of thubans not able to cross 3.7-3.8ghz.

[Habiba22]

So far I have not heard something which will allow to overclock the CPU at Stock voltage. However I would love to have the same if it is possible. I don’t agree with the overclock limit for thubans mentioned by you. as far as I know typical limit for thubans is 4.1 - 4.2ghz. even some people managed to reach 4.5ghz as well. You will get little bit improvement up to hundred MHz if you are having good air cooler or water. For your information there are people who managed to reach 4GHz+ at 1.35v while overclocking Phenom II X6 1055T.

[Fadheela]

I do agree that overclocking with Thubans is far better. However there is great improvement in terms of Deneb architecture from past 1 year. If you wanted more mhz then you have to provide more voltage and having more voltage means there would be more heat generation and it implies that you will need to have better cooler. According to me Water cooling is far better than that of Air cooling. You can easily reach to 4.0ghz quite easily however after that you have to increase the voltage drastically. There are less people who got 4.2-4.3ghz without having water cooler .

[Nabhanyu]

As it has been previously mentioned to get higher performance you need to provide higher amount of the voltage. You can say it is an exponential function to get the desired frequency vs the voltage needed for stability. You will be able to get 4.2GHz by having better water cooler or air cooler. There is nothing like that CPUs are having frequency limit as memory controller available on the motherboard would become unstable. Also Thubans are having faster single threaded performance as compared to Denebs as Thubans are having derived architecture from the Deneb. Today world video games scalable enough to work with the number of cores available. For eg Battlefield 3.

[Ves]

Well I do agree with the thing which you have stated for the video games. if the game has been designed for quad threaded the extra cores provided from the CPU became useful in order to handle the background tasks. You can say browsers, windows services, Game Managers such as Origin or Steam. Hence couple of extra cores would give bit improvement in performance.