Hardware Revolution

The new AMD southbridge, the SB750, which will be officially launched next week and will go along the 790FX and the 790GX is supposed, according to AMD, to improve overclocking with Phenom CPUs, by 200 MHz and more, with a technology called “Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC).

Some websites reviewed the technology, such as AnandTech, to see how it worked and how effective it was. As for the technology itself, we don’t know much about it, except that the SB750 is linked to the AM2+ socket via 6 pins, which allow direct communication with the CPU. Combined with a BIOS update, this allow to change an internal setting of the CPU, the ACC, which is supposed to have an influence on the overclocking capacity of the CPU.

AnandTech got pretty good results with ACC. Their Phenom 9850 BE went from 3.1 to 3.4Ghz thanks to ACC, which is a 300Mhz increase! However, the results will depend on the CPU used, as their Phenom 9950 went from 3.4Ghz to “only” 3.5Ghz, but I’ve got to say that the initial 3.4GHz were already exceptionnal.

Well, the Advanced Clock Calibration, which remains quite mysterious in how exactly it works, as AMD hasn’t revealed that, seems to be a great addition and it should allow AMD to further push the platform aspect, as you absolutely need the latest AMD chipsets to be able to change the ACC.

I can see overclocking enthousiasts jump on this, as 200MHz + is quite a nice increase, especially for Phenom cpus that aren’t exactly known for their great overclocking capacity. Nice move AMD. Now, I hope that this techonology will be expended to all AMD CPUs, especially the Athlon 64 X2.