Investigations into Athlon X2 Overclocking

Closing Thoughts

I'm certain that there are going to be plenty of you who've read this and think, "yeah - so what?" As I said at the outset, this article isn't targeting the hard-core enthusiast or overclocker. Everyone needs to learn how to overclock somewhere (at least if they're interested in that sort of thing), and if nothing else, this should give you an idea of what results to expect, as well as some reasonable starting settings. Again, your results may vary.

Looking at the different RAM options, it's difficult to make a good case for spending tons of money on memory. Yes, it can improve performance by 10% or more in some cases, but in many instances, you will be bottlenecked by some other component in the system. There is one other point to mention on the memory: overclocking with four 512MB DIMMs was almost a complete failure on the setup that we used. Other motherboards, or perhaps a BIOS update for this motherboard, might improve the results, but for now we would recommend caution with such attempts. If you want to run 2GB of RAM, two 1GB DIMMs would be a much better choice. Having that much memory certainly isn't required, but then again, neither is a dual core processor. Personally, I'm done purchasing 512MB DIMMs for myself.

Something many AMD users are concerned with right now is the pending switch to socket M2 and DDR2 memory. From my perspective, it's really not a big deal. Everything that we've heard indicates that the switch will be little more than a change in the memory controller in order to support the new RAM type. If we could compare a 2.4 GHz Athlon X2 with the future DDR2 equivalent right now, I would wager heavily that the difference will be less than 10%. Buying an X2 3800+ right now and overclocking it to 2.6 GHz will, in all likelihood, match the best official dual core processor that AMD will release during the next nine months. (You might also try to get one of the dual core Opteron chips, with which many people are overclocking to 2.8 GHz and beyond.)

I'm not yet done overclocking this Manchester chip, as I want to take a closer look at how the heatsink used affects overclocking performance. What can you reasonably expect from the stock HSF, what can you get with performance air cooling, and how much better is water cooling? I'm already working on gathering results covering these questions. If you have any specific requests or suggestions before then, let me know.