What was largely taboo as early as two years ago has now become something that both major CPU manufacturers tout as a major feature. Since the release of Core 2 Duo, analysts and enthusiasts have been extremely impressed at the overclocking headroom of Intel chips. While AMD’s Athlon 64 series should also go down in history as a heavyweight in the overclocking realm, the same cannot be said for the company’s more recent Phenom chips.

Most reviewers have had difficulty overclocking Phenom chips to anything above 3.0GHz, and even then the maximum overclocks were hardly reliable from a stability standpoint. With the launch of the upcoming SB700 and SB750-based motherboards, AMD not only plans to improve the overclockability of Phenom X3 and X4 processors, but make it easier than ever. Simply by enabling one feature in the BIOS on these motherboards, you automatically overclock your processor by as much as 400MHz. The upcoming AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition processor, which will operate at 2.8GHz, will be automatically overclocked to 3.0GHz on motherboards based on the SB700 chipset, and to 3.2GHz on the SB750.

Clearly this is a radical departure from the once firmly upheld policy of anti-overclocking that both companies were supportive of. This is particularly exciting news for AMD fans that have been frustrated with relatively low clock speeds on their Phenom processors. It is fair to say that a Phenom clocked at 3.2GHz will be superior in many ways to Intel quad-core processors in the 2.66GHz area, which is only impressive since the AMD chip is likely to be cheaper. Of course, all of this goes out the door when you toss Nehalem into the mix. And, since we’re talking about Nehalem, Intel has some overclocking plans of its own.

Intel will be keeping the Extreme Edition moniker going into the Nehalem family of processors. It was previously speculated that Intel was going to completely disallow their upcoming processors to be overclocked, but now it appears that is not the case. The Extreme Edition series has always been overclocking friendly, since by far the easiest method of overclocking has been raising the unlocked multiplier of the CPU. Time will tell if Nehalem overclocks well, but we predict based on some info we’ve heard from Intel that 5.0GHz is not going to be out of the question.

Overall we are more impressed by AMD’s overclocking plans, as no-brain overclocking fits in very well with their consumer-friendly, well-rounded platform approach.

Source: TGDaily

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