The devil is in de tail 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 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 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”, 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. 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.