With the upcoming release of the Phenom II MadShrimps take a look at what we can expect by overclocking every aspect of our Phenom X4 9950 CPU. HT Link, Memory, Northbridge and RAW CPU speed scaling is compared in-depth to help you get the most out of your Phenom setup. Here's an excerpt:

If you're planning to spend a couple of minutes on overclocking, you should go for the raw cpu megahertz overclocking ... which is fairly obvious. Everything else gives a nice boost, but that's it; no real extreme increases in performance. Note that it's important how you interpret the graphs: this is a performance scaling investigation, not an overclocking scaling investigation. Please understand that the given increases are expressed in comparison to a very low base frequency, not at stock speeds. For instance, the performance scaling of the HT Link frequency may seem very impressive in the 3D benchmark, but if you look more closely, you'll notice that 1GHz is almost enough to maximize performance.

The Phenom technology is actually a very interesting product, technology-wise that is. People who want the absolute best performance in benchmarks (and even in 24/7 gaming systems) will be drawn to the Intel side rather quickly. In despite of all the negative comments about the AMD Phenom from most of the extreme overclockers, the platform does really scale quite well, by which I mean that IF the Phenom would have better overclocking yields, it would be much more interesting for them. It's a real pity that most of these 65nm K10 variants still have that obnoxious coldbug.

BUT! A change is coming. The new 45nm products seem to have an excellent overclocking margin as people hit 4GHz on air cooling, 5Ghz on a simple single stage cooling unit and even 6GHz on LN2. No more coldbugs, at least if you're prepared to run the HT Link frequency in 1.0 mode, which means: multiplier 5x. As seen in this article, that'll bring a performance decrease with it, one that is significant enough to speak about a loss in performance; don't worry, though, the extra MHz will (over)compensate that loss. In addition, it's also possible to increase the HT Link frequency by increasing the HTT frequency. Unlike the current technology, it seems to be possible to hit clocks well over 300HTT! Next to that, it will be interesting to see how well the IMC will be able to overclock because, as we all know, the IMC frequency scales pretty well with cold.