Some Th’uban fun

Th’uban stands for Dragon in Arabic, a coincidence? I don’t think so if we take a look at the logos used by AMD to promote their latest products:



I wanted to show you some results of what a somewhat inexperienced overclocked can obtain with these new CPU's. First up we focus on max ram speed on our particular sample. Then overclocking with a Corsair H50 Water Cooling and finally some quick LN2 runs to show off the CPU performance.

About the RAMs

Thuban is not only about extra cores and the Turbo function. The IMC has been improved too and we are already seeing 2200Mhz cas 7 pi runs on the net. My sample is from the pre-retail versions. Pr-retails versions of AMD are always better and manufacturing processes improve as time goes by.

I managed to squeeze out a 2000mhz C7 pi1m run quite easily :


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For SuperPi 32mb I ran into heaps of issues as I couldn't get over 1966Mhz. Keep in mind that these clocks were almost unattainable on the previous generations. I expect our early ACBBE sample being the culprit here. Could also have been your reviewers lacking skills of course... Luckily Massman ran into the same wall. Same cause, an early ACBBE version. Retail versions are CBBBE, so already an updated and improved version of our samples.


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The internet fora however are filled with +2000mhz pi32mb runs. We even have seen some screenshots of users running 8GB's of ram at 2000mhz cas 7. Impossible on the older generation AMD CPU's. Yet the new Thuban IMC is so powerful, it can handle it quite easily daily.

For the guys running air or water-cooling setups, this new hexacore CPU continues the trend of the latest C3 batches. Good overclockability at very acceptable voltages.

4.2Ghz at 1.45Vcore was rockstable, this cooled by the little nifty Corsair H50 unit. Really not too bad as my 965BE can't even breach 4Ghz at these volts. The IMC also requires less volts, 2600mhz operations was no problem at only 1.2 CPU NB voltage.


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Bring on the subzero action

Some quick LN2 fun... limiting myself at 1.7Vcore set in bios... 5.7~5.8Ghz benchmark stable!



For more in depth AMD Thuban overclocking and performance scaling I refer to the excellent write ups from Massman,Thuban OCing scaling with cooling and voltage and AMD Thuban NB and Memory performance scaling