Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940

As we showed you on the previous page, the new Phenom II X4 processors look just like the original Phenoms, or older Athlons for that matter. But we fired up the latest version of CPU-Z to take a look at our Phenom II X4 940 processor's inner workings, because there are some distinct differences with the underlying technology.

  
AMD Phenom II X4 940 CPU-Z Details

CPU-Z correctly identifies the processor as a Phenom II, based on the core codenamed "Deneb". As the information shows, the chip is manufactured using AMD's 45nm process technology and our particular sample has a stepping designation of 2 and revision of RB-C2. The chip is clocked at 3GHz, due to its 15x multiplier and 200MHz base clock, the HT link is running at 1.8GHz, and there is 512K of L1 Data / Instruction cache, 2MB of L2 cache (512K per core), and 6MB of shared L3 cache.
 

Overclocking The Phenom II X4 940 Pedal To The Metal

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Overclocked to 3.73GHz

With all of the information AMD has already revealed regarding the Phenom II's overclockability, we were eager to see what our particular chip could do. We didn't use any exotic cooling for our overclocking experiments, opting instead to see just how far the chip would go with a stock AMD PIB air cooler installed. With only a minor bump in voltage to 1.575v, we were able to take our particular CPU to almost 3.8GHz using the stock air cooler alone. That speed was achieved with an 18.5x multiplier and a 202MHz base clock; the components were installed in a basic mid-tower. The AMD Overdrive utility shown in the screenshot above did not report clock speeds correctly, but assuming thermal readings were correct (we don't think they were), the chip ran at about 50'C while overclocked.