FPSLabs : AMD in OverDrive

Posted by Thomas Gribble in February 7th, 2008

Posted in: Latest

AMD’s overclocking utility finally made available on their own website… sorta

For a lot of people, the biggest selling point of AMD’s recently launched Spider platform was not the Phenom processor, Radeon HD 3870 video card, or 790 series motherboard; it was the overclocking utility, called “OverDrive”, that could so seamlessly control all three hardware components. However, owners of Spider platforms have likely endured significant frustration navigating through AMD’s network of sites in search for the utility (us included) with no success. The only site we were aware of that offered the utility was techpowerUp, who had several different versions available for download. Even after downloading, however, many people still had compatibility issues running the software.

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Now, a full two and a half months after the official launch of the Spider platform, AMD has finally created an area on their site with links to the OverDrive utility. Curiously, however, the OverDrive page points to two external sites for downloading: ASUS and techpowerUp. We do not know whether or not AMD plans to furnish the utility on their own site in the future, but at least now users searching for the software will be able to find it.

An AMD representative first showed us the OverDrive interface and explained its features way back in late August of last year. We were ecstatic to see that the features from the slideshow made it to the final release. Perhaps the coolest part of the overDrive utility is its ability to overclock all four cores of the Phenom processor independently. This is just one example of the advanced features set provided by the software, and there are more basic options for inexperienced users as well. Spider platform customers can place a minor overclock across all system components with the click of a button to boost performance considerably.

The OverDrive utility received great acclaim when the Spider platform launch as drew comparisons to the far inferior yet similar in concept nTune utility from NVIDIA. FPSLabs is currently working on a short review of a computer system built around the Spider Platform that we hope to have published sometime in the near future. We will give our full impressions of the OverDrive utility at that time.

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