Overclocking Bulldozer: The Guide

Just in case you were wondering just how the mechanics of AMD’s new Bulldozer CPUs work in terms of Overclocking, here is a cool and expansive guide that covers in detail the key nuts and bolts of how you’re going to get to that 4.7GHz and beyond. Ardent Overclocker and author Sin0822 has done a great job of creating an Overclocking guide that will be really useful for novices and experienced players alike.

Regarding the new AMD chip itself, Sin0822 clearly sees plenty of potential for hours, upon hours of Overclocking pleasure:

“Bulldozer overclocks like Sandy Bridge for the most part, but even better in many cases. Even on air/water you will be looking at 4.8 GHz-5.2 GHz per CPU, even with an 8-core CPU. That will undoubtedly scale with voltage and cooling, as Bulldozer holds the max CPU frequency World Record, this CPU is really fun to overclock. Now this might seem kind of crazy, that AMD was able to increase the core count, yet increase the overclocking potential of the CPU, and in the end that might just save AMD. From what I have seen Bulldozer needs to be overclocked a lot, and tuned very finely, to produce any comparable results. That is what I am going to show you today, my results on air/water, and I will update this guide with LN2 cooling results. I used an Antec Kuhler 920, it’s a decent CPU cooler, it’s one of those all-in-one solutions. It has its limitations, but it does a pretty good job of cooling, but if you have a high quality air cooler, they will do about the same. Here is what you need to use, or what I used to get overclocking!”

You can find the guide on a number of forums, including Overclockers.com, ExtremeSystems.org, Overclock.net and TweakTown.