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:
⤢ ВІДКРИТИ
⤢ ВІДКРИТИ789 points at a processor frequency of 6243MHz. This result already significantly surpasses the metrics of the 6-core, 12-thread Core i7-990X.
⤢ ВІДКРИТИ
⤢ ВІДКРИТИ15002 points at the same 6243MHz frequency.
⤢ ВІДКРИТИ
⤢ ВІДКРИТИHowever, 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:
Processor - AMD Phenom II X4 960T
Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD7
RAM - Corsair Dominator GT (2x 2GB sticks)
Graphics card - NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
Other components remained unknown.
Source: cnzdrn's HWBot profile
