90nm Socket 939 Processors and Overclocking

As far as stability goes, it should be fine with an adequate power supply and cooling equipment.

It not really hard to do, and stability should be okay as long as you don't try to overclock it by too much. Processors always leave a considerable "safety margin" in their quoted clock speeds.

Running it faster will of course create more heat, which increases the change of a catastrophic failure. (but this can be alleviated with proper cooling) The CPU will also "wear out" somewhat faster, especially on newer chips. (newer chips have a much shorter "lifespan" as their traces are ludicrously small, whereas older chips had larger traces that would take a lot longer to break.)

You have to be careful about tests made by sites like Anandtech as they're probably using some good hardware and cooling equipment. In other words, don't expect to get the same returns on overclocking an equivalent configuration.

As for overclocking CPUs in general, here's a few things you should know :

- Each cpu belongs to a general family and a particular series.
- A CPU is potentially overclockable to the same speed as the fastest CPU available in a series. This would explain why a 1.8 GHz chip can be overclocked to the same speeds as a 2.2 GHz chip. In fact, all CPUs in a same series are practically *identical*.
- The clock multiplier : this is what determines how many times faster a CPU runs compared to the bus frequency. The bus frequency is actually the "speed" at which the bus between the CPU and memory operates. This is one bottleneck to consider on the performance side of things. Most CPUs today have a locked multiplier.
- Voltage : a higher voltage usually makes a chip more stable but this is a very dangerous setting to mess with. Only apply a higher voltage if you a know that a higher-end chip is of the same series and uses the same voltage. Higher voltage will increase the quantity of heat being output by a big factor. Refer to some site about electricity to see why.
- The risks of overclocking : the CPU runs too hot, it dies and you have to replace it. It's as simple as that. Always use appropriate cooling and go overkill if you can.

Hrmm, probrably not, but that's sort of a guess. If they can both be overclocked to the same frequency, then their cores are probrably very similar, so they would probrably generate the same heat at the same clock speed. "Probrably."

Locked, afaik the only cpu's that are still multiplier unlocked are the mobile bartons.

Err, yeah, there's that. You can overclock the bus though. That will probrably give better performance improvements than just overclocking the CPU too. However, it's somewhat trickier because you are effectively overclocking your CPU, RAM, video card, etc. all together so you can only overclock to the lowest common denominator.

As BinarySystem says, they upped the FSB to 290x9 :drools:

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Could you his those o/c's? Well, it's a bit of a black art and manufacturers tend to send review sites cherry picked hardware. Best thing is to let these cpu's hit the stores and check what steppings are doing well with what mobo & ram combo's.

This depends more or less on what your FSB can be set to, which I believe is motherboard dependant. I don't know how small of an increment that board is capable of, as it varies.

Also what Deathmaker says is true: individual transistors and traces on the core are so tiny these days, (about a thousand atoms wide) and the wavelength of the laser is only so small. This leads to a fair amount of inconsistency because the smallest speck of contaminant or temperature fluctuation can cause diffusion of the laser and create a transistor of a somewhat different shape, etcetera. That is why there is a considerable "safety margin" in the rating of any CPU.

However, one point of interest is that if they were overclocking by raising the FSB, the 1.8 should be somewhat faster than the 2.2 at the same clock speed, because it will have a higher FSB clock speed - which also affects the clock speed of your video card, RAM, etcetera - so those components would be getting more of an overclock than they would with the 2.2 at the same speed.