The upcoming AMD FX CPUs are expected to take the performance crown from Intel, or at least rekindle the performance wars of old in the Athlon FX and Pentium era. And what better way to announce how great your flagship octa-core processor is than having it beat the Guinness World record with a speed of 8.429GHz?!

The ‘Team AMD FX’ group achieved this result on 31st August in Texas on an as yet unspecified Bulldozer X-Series ‘Zambezi’ CPU. The new eight-core Bulldozer CPUs will be available by the end of this month; rest assured we’ll have a review for it soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Full Press Release

AMD Showcases World’s Fastest CPU

– AMD FX CPU inducted into Guinness Book of World Records –

Sunnyvale, Calif. — Sept. 13, 2011 — A longtime favorite of performance enthusiasts and overclockers around the world, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced it has achieved the Guinness World Record for the “Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor,” by overclocking the upcoming 8-core AMD FX desktop processor.

“The record-breaking processor speed that resides in the AMD FX CPU clearly demonstrates performance gains for the new AMD „Bulldozer‟ multi-core architecture, which will provide x86 computing power for this CPU and future AMD Accelerated Processing Units,” said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Group at AMD. “Along with world-record frequencies, the AMD FX processor will enable an unrivaled enthusiast PC experience for the money – extreme multi-display gaming, mega-tasking and HD content creation.”

The AMD FX CPU, set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2011, achieved a top speed of 8.429 GHz, – surpassing the previous record of 8.308 GHz. The record was set Aug. 31, 2011, in Austin, Texas, by “Team AMD FX,” a group comprised of elite overclocking specialists working alongside top AMD technologists, who will also be named in the Guinness World Records.

“We applaud AMD for their entry into Guinness World Records® for achieving the Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor,” said Freddie Hoff, adjudicator for Guinness World Records, who is presenting the award today at the AMD FusionZone, a technology showcase in San Francisco, Calif. “We congratulate everyone involved in this record-breaking achievement.”

The record marks another accomplishment in the storied history of the FX brand, which represents amazing, unrestrained PC experiences that users can see and feel. All FX branded products, including the upcoming AMD FX CPU, will offer completely unlocked processor clock multipliers for easier PC enthusiast overclocking, and include exclusive AMD software through the AMD VISION Engine to fine-tune system performance. For FX branded processors, AMD has removed all the stops to enable a fully unlocked experience, giving overclockers and PC enthusiasts complete customization and flexibility.

Being a socket AM3 based motherboard, the ECS A890GXM-A2 will support pretty much any processor released by AMD in the last 2 years, including the latest X6 processors. The specialty here is that it has the ability to unlock some of the hidden cores on some of the Phenom II and Sempron 140 processors through the BIOS itself. Unfortunately we didn’t have any AMD processor from that range otherwise this would have been a really fun little experiment to conduct.

Being a Black Series motherboard, overclocking is something that was factored into the board’s design from inception. So things like dual heat pipes and large fins for heatsinks are quite a common sight. One other interesting thing on the ECS A890GXM-A2 is the onboard AMD HD 4290 graphics chip with 128MB GDDR3 memory onboard. This little card allows you to connect the motherboard to any monitor or TV via VGA, DVI, HDMI or a DisplayPort. A good option for those who just want to use their PC for more computing tasks than gaming, but let’s face it, nobody will buy a Black Series motherboard just for its onboard graphics capability, minuscule as it is. This is why the ECS A890GXM-A2 also features two PCI-e x16 slots for 2-way CrossFire setup.

Apart from all that, the ECS A890GXM-A2 features your, now usual, features like USB 3.0 and SATA 3G (@ 6GBps). Then there are the BIOS and Drivers update utility along with the eJIFFY interface based on LINUX. Think of it like a UI system present in many netbooks and laptops that basically allows you access to the web and IM service. This is, of course, additional software for you to install, so users can skip it entirely if your Windows 7 boots up in 10 seconds on your RAIDed SSDs.

As a regular exercise, many manufacturers release special editions of components alongside their normal hardware versions on the market. What generally makes these components different isn’t just a unique physical appearance but the effort and brilliance of taking the product to extreme levels of performance. And while there are quite a few of such special edition graphics card that command a price premium, fewer still are the ones that really deserve it. The MSI N460GTX Hawk is one such card.

Starting off with the packaging, the N460GTX Hawk comes with manuals, a drivers CD containing the overclocking utility Afterburner, two power cables, three Multimeter V-Check point cables, a DVI to VGA adapter and a mini-HDMI converter. And finally we have certificate that reassures us an MSI engineer confirmed the N460GTX Hawk will run at all the factory settings and not blow up.

So what sets the MSI N460GTX Hawk apart from all other vanilla Nvidia GTX 460 graphics card is the heatsink and overclocking potential. Attached on the main body is MSI’s creatively named Twin Frozr II heatsink that has two fans on top of an intricately laid out network of fins and heatpipes. While the thing certainly looks awesome, it designed to match the over the top performance of the card. The core clock comes with a factory set speed of 780MHz which is over a 100MHz higher than the 675MHz reference speed of almost all other GTX460 cards. Thanks to the Twin Frozr II heatsink and the Afterburner overclocking utility, the N460GTX Hawk is advertised to reach a maximum Core clock of 1GHz. We’ll get to that later on, for now let’s start with the basic benchmarks.

There’s been a lot of mainstream tech this week at the Tbreak HQ. Earlier we reviewed the mid-level enthusiast motherboard from Gigabyte, the X58A-UD3R, and today we’ll be looking at a proper high-end mainstream motherboard. Why’s the ECS P55H-AK a “high-end mainstream” board? Well, it’s a LGA 1156 for starters, as opposed to the LGA 1366 X58A-UD3R, so no high-end Core i7 processors to be seen here. That said, the ECS P55H-AK is a Black Series motherboard, and as such it’s chock full of enthusiast specific features.

Apart from the User Guides and Driver CD, the ECS P55H-AK is packaged with four SATA cables and three SLI connectors, but it also comes with a 3.5” bracket for two USB 3.0 ports. This is thanks to the extra NEC chip, one of which provides two USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O panel. Speaking of which, the ECS P55H-AK also has two Marvell SATA3 chips which provide two SATA 6Gb/s chips on the board and two more eSATA 6 Gb/s ports on the rear panel as well.

Extra goodies aside, the ECS P55H-AK supports 3-way SLI or CrossFireX along with support for unlocked Core i7 and i5 processors. Dual Channel memory can go all the way up to 2400 MHz with overclocking, supporting 16GB onboard. Besides that, the rear I/O panel also supports eight USB 2.0 ports, two gigabit LAN ports and your regular ports for 8 channel audio out.

The overall size and layout of the board is small enough to fit in any mid-sized ATX casing.

Today we’re taking a look at one of the highest end cards from ASUS’s ATI offerings, the Matrix 5870 Platinum graphics card. It comes with a slight factory overclock GPU at 894MHz Core (compared to 850MHz reference) clock speed. Everything else remains the same; except that the Matrix 5870 Platinum also comes with 2GB GDDR5 instead of the standard 1GB memory on other HD 5870 cards in the market.

Due to these additional bells and whistles, the ASUS Matrix 5870 Platinum retails at AED 2150 ($ 527) which is a little higher than other 2GB variants of the HD 5870 cards out there.

As with most of ASUS’s graphics card, the packaging is simple and minimal. Along with the drivers is included the iTracker2 overclocking utility, two 8-pin to 6-pin splitter cables, two HDMI to DVI and DVI to VGA connectors and a Crossfire cable. The Matrix 5870 Platinum forgoes the secondary DVI port, instead coming with an HDMI (v1.3) and native Display Port. Also, note the Safe Mode button at the back. Think of it as CMOS Clear button which will basically reset any ambitious overclocked settings on the card, bringing it back to factory default speeds so that the PC can easily boot up.

Another interesting feature of the Matrix 5870 Platinum is the GPU load lighting system on the card itself. Under different levels of stress, the colours will keep on changing. So, for instance, under normal to light load, the colours will hover between dark and light blue. Running the Just Cause 2 benchmark turned the lights to purple, while some parts of 3DMARK Vantage were giving off a red glow.

Moving on to the real meat of the review, let’s look at our testbed comprises of an Intel 965 EE Quadcore CPU @ 3.2GHz with 3GB Corsair DDR3-1333 RAM on the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 motherboard. ATI’s latest driver, Catalyst 10.7 was used for testing the ASUS Matrix 5870 Platinum.

As this is my first blog, I thought of posting about something extreme, so here goes:

It all started with me wanting to build a system with Crossfire capabilities so I could run a Crossfire setup anytime with any ATI card- I admit, I am fan of their cards. The reason I prefer working more with ATI cards than NVIDIA is simply because I have a water cooling setup with two Dangerden Maze 5 GPU blocks connected in the loop. This block can be mounted on an ATI X800 GTO, 1900XT, 1900XTX, 2900XT, HD 3850 , 3870, 4850, 4870 and the 4890. Basically, the water block is compatible with almost all ATI cards due to the positioning of the four mounting holes around the GPU staying unchanged throughout the years.

This is very much unlike NVIDIA, where almost each generation or series of cards has its own uniquely sized holes, making it hard to upgrade.

Having said that, let’s take a look at my gaming rig’s specifications:
• CPU: Intel QX 9770 Extreme Edition
• Motherboard: Asus Maximus Extreme X38
• GPU: 2x Asus EAH4890 with Voltage Tweak
• RAM: 2x Corsair CM3X1024-1800C7DHX + 2xOCZ OCZ3P16001G
• Sound card: Creative Xtreme Music
• PSU: Enermax Galaxy 1000w
• Hard Drive: 2x Seagate 320GB @ RAID0
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit SP2

Before making any changes to my system, I first removed the heatsink from both 4890s and installed only the red heatsink with the fan on it and mounted the Dangerden Maze 5 GPU block. I saw temperatures of approximately 30° C at idle and around 40° C at load.

I started to benchmark my setup with the default settings to see what the score would be, and the result was a total score of 15755, comprising of 17011 as the GPU Score and 12899 as the CPU Score with 3Dmark Vantage.

Validation: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dmv=1374498

It’s actually pretty impressive considering the setup is faster than a single 4870X2 or two 4870 cards, on default settings. So I chose to overclock the GPU’s first and kept the CPU at stock. To do that I used Rivatuner v2.24 with a registry hack to enable overclocking on the 4890 with Voltage adjusting.

After hours of tuning to see what the optimum voltage setting would be with best clock speed so I don’t throttle the GPU and bring down the scores, I managed to stick with 1.5v on the GPU running at 1050MHz and 1200MHz on memory. I managed to obtain a total score of 17342 Mark, comprising of 19393 GPU Score and 13165 CPU score, so that’s an extra 1587 points achieved by simply overclocking the GPU’s.

Validation: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dmv=1374525

But I wasn’t done yet; I still had the Qx9770 CPU to overclock, so I went back to the BIOS to adjust the multiplier to 10x, FSB to 425 and CPU Voltage to 1.62500v, after which CPU showed 1.52v in the Windows screen. RAM speed was set to 1700MHz by running it at1.94v which enabled the Quad core CPU to run fully stable at 4250MHz. This is despite the X38 motherboard limiting me- I’ve tested the same CPU on the Asus Rampage Extreme and managed to gain a stable 4.4GHz.

Anyway, I benchmarked the setup and I was left with 19983 Mark on Vantage which made me go crazy as I was only 17 marks shy of hitting 20k, so I restarted the setup, went back to Windows, but this time, I cleaned unnecessary applications using the Task Manager and increased the memory speed on both of the 4890’s to 1210MHz. I started 3Dmark Vantage and closed my eyes, hoping to cross the 20k score…

Once 3Dmark Vantage had completed, I opened my eyes to see the 20124 Mark on the screen with 21406 on GPU score and 17057 on CPU score which made me ecstatic!

Now I am ranked #9 in 3Dmark Vantage with Performance settings along with 4890 Cards among the rest of the benchmarks! Validation: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dmv=1381652