Well, I grabbed a 1090T + Biostar T890fxe board combo at Fry's. Was too good of a deal to pass up! Was going to grab whatever good combo they had--happened to be AMD the day I went, so I grabbed that, hah! Man, so different from Intel in the way they "handle" and overclock! Took me a good bit to tweak it to be both fast and 100% stable. I wasn't sure I was going to get it stable and I was really getting frustrated with it!!! Turns out these things, at least mine, really don't like to have the RAM clocked very high compared to Intel stuff! Really strange!
Wow, AMD overdrive is great though!
Here's what I did:
1. 220mhz base clock.
2. HT clock set to x9, runs at 1980.
3. CPU-NB set to x10, runs at 2200 (seems to make a bit of a performance difference, may try to see if 2.4ghz is stable later).
4. CPU Voltage set to 1.35, CPU-NB voltage at 1.25.
5. I've left power management and turbo on. (Yay!!! My i7 was never stable with the power management features on when OC'd!) Omg runs so cool while idle or just using 1 or 2 cores, even when 2 cores are turboed way up!
6. These things sure are temp sensitive, so what I did was:
All 6 cores run at 3.85ghz with the voltages listed above. Runs nice 'n quiet and stable running prime95 x 6 on blend or in-place large ffts.
Then, turbo core is on and set in AMD overdrive to be limited to two cores. Voltage on that set to 1.55 (seemed scary coming from Intel where that'd be like omg fry yer cpu voltage...but here it's fine as long as it's kept cool, lol). Two cores turbo to 4180 (i think...the oddity was it really ends up running at like 4160-something instead of 4180, yeah, not a multiplier of 220 but w/e, that's what it does). 100% stable running prime95 blend or large ffts x 2. Stays stable if I set affinity to two individual cores, or if I let windows do it's thing. That 4.15ghz really kicks ass for gaming. I'd say it's about the same there as my i5 750 was at 3.8-3.9ghz.
I haven't experimented yet to see if there's any cores that'd be stable at a higher multiplier (ie if maybe core4 would do 4.3ghz or something). Meh. Temps are soooo good, verified in bios and amd overdrive, not just the about 10c low Coretemp ones. Temps got out of hand fast if I put all cores at 4.1ghz 1.5V or something though--runs stable for a few minutes running say, prime95 blend x 6 and the temp just keeps on climbing until it reaches like 65C and then blue screens. Lol. Not cool. With it like this temps reach 40-46C.
Playing Everquest 2 (yeah, yeah, make fun of me, sure, *giggle*)...it performs...how do I say this...differently...from the i5 750. You can "feel" that it's different. Max FPS on the phenom is slightly lower (by slightly I mean 1-3fps or there abouts). Min FPS in really crowded areas is about the same (if you have particle effects up in battlegrounds with 30ppl all fighting you'll get like 15fps on either system, horribly coded game). However, where the i7 would have little "hitches" where the min fps would drop for a second or would "stutter" the phenom doesn't do that at all, ever. Leading to the phenom being overall smoother gameplay experience in most cases, but less smooth in a couple areas where the i7 would have gotten 30fps and the phenom gets 28, for example. Anyway, great CPU. Doesn't dethrone Intel or anything, I love Intel (I live in Oregon, it's a requirement lol!) But great CPU. Overclocks like a champ, definitely competitive with i5 750, i7 920. AMD really did something that makes these chips able to clock higher, my friend at work has an older quad phenom II black edition and can't get over 3.6 lol.