Cnzdrn: 3 AMD Phenom II X4 960T BE Records on HWBot

The heart of the AMD Phenom II X4 960T BE processor is the Zosma core, which itself was only made possible by the 6-core Thuban die.

Essentially, today's news subject is an AMD Phenom II X6 with two cores disabled for some reason, turning it into a 4-core processor. Similarly, with a compatible motherboard, the Phenom II X4 960T BE chip can be unlocked to either a 6-core or, more interestingly, a 5-core processor.

As we previously mentioned in a past article, the HWBot competition database includes a category for the number of active cores on a tested chip.

Italian overclocker under the nickname cnzdrn fully exploited this feature of the site. The enthusiast took a Phenom II X4 960T, activated only one of its two factory-disabled cores, and secured 3 records in the processor's model category:

789 points at a processor frequency of 6243MHz. This result already significantly surpasses the metrics of the 6-core, 12-thread Core i7-990X.

15002 points at the same 6243MHz frequency.

However, in the GPUPI for CPU - 1B benchmark, with a result of 10 minutes, 53 seconds, and 473 milliseconds, the processor's frequency couldn't be maintained at the previous level, and the overclocker dropped to 6188.3MHz.

An interesting fact: it turns out (the news author doesn't closely follow the 5-core discipline) that a surprising 30 overclockers submitted their results in the same Cinebench R15 benchmark. That's quite a lot, considering the relatively low popularity of the Zosma-based Phenom II X4.

The record-breaking test setup included the following components: