The history of the Athlon 64 X2 processor began back in 2002, even then AMD corporation knew that it would not achieve anything by following the path of high frequencies. The K8 architecture was designed for a multi-core design from the very first die, which is why AMD was the first to design and release a dual-core processor.

2005 will be remembered by AMD as the most successful year, after which there were continuous blunders…

But today we will not be discussing the company itself. Instead, we will try to overclock one of the budget processors, namely Athlon 64 X2 4200+.

The chip is based on a 65nm technical process. The base frequency of this model is 2200MHz, the speed of the HT (HyperTransport) bus is 1000MHz and the FSB frequency is 200MHz. The supply voltage of the cores is 1.220 volts.

At first, the ASUS M2N68-AM SE2 motherboard was taken for overclocking, but as it turned out, it was not able to change the HT bus multiplier. Having rummaged a little at home among the motherboards for the AM2 connector, I suddenly found the ASUS M2V board, which apparently had the capacitors in the CPU power circuit killed. Nothing complicated – ordinary soldering quickly and reliably brought the board back to life. Having looked at its BIOS overclocking capabilities, I decided to use it for today’s material.

Test setup:

  • Motherboard – ASUS M2V
  • Cooler– Scythe Ninja B2
  • RAM – 2xPQI PC-6400 1Gb
  • Video card– Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 256Mb
  • Power Supply – FSP 400W
  • Operating system Windows XP SP3

Overclocking

Overclocking was carried out by reducing the HT frequency to 600 MHz and increasing the processor power to 1.45 volts. The frequency increased until the RAM became a brake.

I raised the voltage on DDR2 to 1.95 volts and moved on. However, this action did not help to achieve more. The processor stopped responding to an increase in voltage and even 1.5 volts did not allow it to boot even at a frequency of 3200 MHz. Moreover, the temperature fluctuated within 43 degrees, so it was clearly not in it.

The result of this test session was a rather modest frequency, but by the standards of the AMD K8 architecture it is not bad: 3000 MHz

Moreover, it was taken at a voltage of only 1.360 volts!

Conclusions

With the help of overclocking, we managed to increase the clock speed of the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ by 36%, looking at the overclocking results of the AMD K10 and Intel Core processors, this is not at all impressive. Nevertheless, the increase in performance depending on the clock frequency is quite linear, and the speed in applications will increase irreversibly, which means that even such overclocking has a right to exist.

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