AMD® Phenom™ II Overclocking Thread

[AndreiD]

I had a 1055T and it was great at that time, I also remember that a lot of backlash against AMD when Bulldozer launched was related to it being slower in a lot of tasks than the 6 core Phenom IIs, especially gaming.
Good CPUs but they're a bit dated right now.

 

[Doobedoo]

The phenom CPUs were amazing though I'm all nostalgic about my X2 550 unlocking! Such a bargain, I remember paying £65 for it in mid 2010 and upgrading from my core 2 duo E6420 @ 3.2GHz.It was much faster.

Yeah same here. I brought one for about £60 and it unlocked to a quad. Still have it and it still works. Hands down my favorite cpu so far so much value for money.

 

[luismenendez]

haha I am still using my X2 550 with 4 cores! (no gaming for years obviously!)

 

[Uriel]

haha I am still using my X2 550 with 4 cores! (no gaming for years obviously!)

Your CPU would perform quite admirably in many new games if paired with a recent mid-range nVIDIA GPU (noting my previous post about AMD GPU driver overhead on weaker CPUs), should you have any inclination to upgrade. You might want to top up to 8GB RAM too, if you decided to give it a go.

 

[schumi84]

I had to go back to my 1090T after killing my 4670K and it still performs admirably, still at its 3.8GHz clock, though gaming time is limited to say the least.

RAM pricing is making any sort of upgrade prohibitively expensive for the time being so unless it dies completely I can’t see any upgrade happening until Ryzen 2 or maybe 3 is out.

 

[AmateurExpert]

it's frequently worse with an AMD GPU than with an nVIDIA one because of their respective driver overheads

Not sure it's really down to driver overheads but certain decisions that Nvidia made with their GPU architecture (specifically in the scheduling area) mean that their drivers can better utilise multi-core/multi-thread CPUs, at least for DX11. DX12 & Vulkan do allow AMD drivers to make better use of CPU and GPU resources.

There's an interesting video about this: