Replies to post #7472 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

wbmw -

Would you normally expect a 1.6GHz chip to have such small headroom unless it was hand sorted or rescreened?

All parts are individually screened, fast ones and slow ones, and they have to have a speed guardband to compensate for the inevitable degradation that results from some long term effects to silicon. There is always speed distribution. I recently bought an Intel 2.4GHz P4 and it has very little overclockability, I was unlucky. I would think 2.4GHz is very near the bottom of the speed distribution, if not below it. Maybe it's the cheap memory I bought? You have to look at a large distribution to get a good feel for the overall process however this one single sample point is not inconsistent with the other data that says AMD has yet to get a good handle on manufacturing Hammer. Now if you got a 1.6GHz Hammer and it easily overclocked, that would be unexpected!

[spokeshave]

wbmw: Re: It looks as if AMD is scraping the bottom of the barrel just to get the frequencies they already have.

Good to see that you don't jump to comclusions based on a single poorly conducted overclocking attempt :)

Considering that the memory and AGP were being run seriously out of spec, it is a tenuous conclusion at best that the cpu was the limiting factor in that overclock. The system almost certainly was limited by the memory.

[j3pflynn]

wbmw, you have no reason to assume that it is a CPU problem. At 1.8GHz, the AGP would be at 75MHz, which causes many cards to have problems. Besides, we don't know anymore at this point about the rating of the RAM, other than being DDR333. We'll know that in a few days, though, I'm sure. Patience, grasshopper!
Paul