14 DAY TRIAL // Although just a few years ago every serious overclocker out there was running an AMD platform, nowadays Intel rules supreme in the overclocking world, so it comes as great news to see that AMD is still in this game, an overclocker managing to hit the 5GHz mark with an AMD processor by using nothing more than air cooling.
Going by the name of Mad222, the overclocker achieved this feat by using an Phenom II X4 955 processor that is normally clocked at 3.2GHz and comes with 6MB of shared L3 cache memory.
Although a pretty old processor in AMD's lineup, this makes part of the Black Edition series, meaning it comes with an unlocked multiplier, allowing the overclocker to go from the standard 16x multi to 23.5x.
Combined with a 213MHz bus frequency and a whopping 1.55V core voltage this allowed Mad222 to reach an impressive 5004MHz frequency, making this the highest air clocked AMD processor to date.
The previous record was held by an overclocker going by the name of bennyluk that managed to reach 4911MHz with an Thuban core Phenom II X6 1055T processor.
Although by no means a less than impressive feat, this is not something that every AMD processor out there is capable of doing, this overclock having been achieved for a limited period of time without any processor intensive tasks being run in the background.
To put things in perspective, according to HWBot, some of the upcoming Gulftown-based Intel Core i7 990X processors are capable of reaching 5GHz while running 3DMark Vantage just by using air cooling.
This latest AMD overclocking world record comes just a few days after a Brazilian overclocker managed to push a Phenom II X4 975BE processor to 7134.31MHz using LN2 (liquid nitrogen) cooling, this becoming the fastest AMD CPU to date.