Athlon Dual Core: Overclocking the 4200+

Final Words

The 4200+ is the least expensive of the new Athlon 64 Dual-Core processors, but $500 is only cheap compared to the other members of the X2 line which can cost as much as $1000 to own. The good news is the 4200+ performs very well on its own. It performs about like a similar speed single core in gaming and 3D workstation tasks, which means it is a little slower than the 4000+ in these heavily single-threaded tasks. If you are a gamer, and that is all you care about on your PC, then the Dual-Core processors will hold no advantage for you over the current single-core models. Performance does not suffer to any great extent compared to single-core, but you need another use for dual-core to tip the scales in the more expensive dual-core direction.

When even a bit of multitasking comes into play, however, the 4200+ soars ahead, with significant performance advantages in the general performance PCMark2004 benchmark and an advantage in Multimedia Content Creation 2004. Media Encoding is one particular area where the x2 4200+ shines, outperforming the higher speed 4000+ by 41% at stock speed and by almost 71% when overclocked to 2.7GHz. The performance advantage for Dual-Core in Media Encoding is so significant that the X2 becomes a "must-have" if you do much media encoding.

These results are all while running in Windows XP, and there should be even further performance improvement in the 64-bit version of XP. Until there are useful benchmarks that really take advantage of the 64-bit OS we can only speculate on 64-bit performance, but the clean implementation of 64-bit by AMD should definitely yield performance advantages in 64-bit. The advantages should be similar to those AnandTech found for Opteron in the recent article comparing processors in 64-bit Linux.

The point of this article though is OVERCLOCKING the 4200+, and there is more good news there. Our early 4000+ processors only overclocked about 11 to 12% at stock multiplier. We do have a later 4000+ (that is likely an FX55 at heart) that overclocks about 18% at stock multiplier, which is the one we use in memory reviews. This 4200+, a new speed grade, is doing 22.5% at the start, reaching 2.7GHz on air. That's a 500MHz overclock, and is 300MHz higher than the fastest x2 you can buy (2.4GHz 4800+ and 4600+). This kind of overclocking performance makes the 4200+ a much more attractive option at the $500 you will pay for it - since it will likely reach higher performance levels that a stock 4800+.

You can likely do even better than we have if you use more exotic cooling. We have seen many reports on the web of the 4200+ reaching 2.8GHz or even 3.0GHz. We have also seen reports of the 4800+ reaching even a bit higher, so even better overclocks may be available with a 4800+. Anand is reaching 2.8GHz on air with the 4800+ he has been testing.

In the end the 4200+ appears to be a good-performing dual-core CPU with quite a bit of overclocking headroom. We reached 2.7GHz with a PC Health reported CPU temperature of 61 degrees C at 1.55V. 240 was a breeze at 1.45V, exceptionally stable for days on end, with processor temps generally below 50C with our air cooling. It appears an easy task to reach the highest levels of Dual-Core performance with the cheapest 4200+ if you are willing to overclock a little - and the 4200+ is up to the task.

The 4200+ running OC at 2.4GHz is equivalent to a 4600+, which brings us back to the question of which x2 Athlon 64 we would buy for ourselves. With the 4400+ sporting 1MB cache on each core, and only a few dollars more than the 512KB 4200+, we would suspect the 4400+ may well be the Dual-Core to buy - IF it overclocks as well as the 4200+. We don't have a 4400+ to test for ourselves, but given the performance of the 1MB cache 4800+ we have seen, we expect the 4400+ will likely overclock just as well.