Legit Processor Reviews
AMD Athlon II X4 635 2.9GHz Quad Core Processor Review
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | AMD Athlon II X4 635 |
| Date: | Wed, Feb 03, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Dan Stoltz - |
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Overclocking the AMD Athlon II X4 635
Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.
With stock BIOS settings, the Athlon II X4 635 processor runs with a 200MHz bus speed and an x14.5 multiplier that is used to reach the final core clock of 2.9GHz. The multiplier is locked, so the only way to overclock the processor is to raise the bus speed.
Without changing any settings in the BIOS, just to see how high we could get with 'AUTO' voltages I was able to bring the FSB to 240MHz for a total speed of 3480 MHz.
By cranking the voltage up to 1.65V in the motherboard's BIOS we were able to get the FSB up to 267MHz and the system to a overclock of 3738MHz. It took alot more voltage to hit this overclock than I like but it was a fairly stable set-up.
The MSI 785GM-E65 motherboard that we used for testing had a fairly decent BIOS that allows you to overclock a processor like the Athlon II X4 635 quickly and easily. The picture above shows the BIOS settings that we used to reach our highest overclock in case you have this board and processor combination and want to try to reach this level of performance.
Here is a quick look at the voltages we used, and as you can tell we only needed to adjust the values on two of the settings to reach this overclock. It was really that simple. To go beyond an overclock like this you will need better cooling and you will need to spend more time fine tuning the voltages to get the most from your processor.
Above you can see the before and after results in 3DMark Vantage the overclock did help overall system performance. After a 28.8% boost in the speed of the cpu we noticed a boost in the overall score of 1500 3DMarks, but what was more impressive was the 2,400 3DMark boost in the CPU score! Overall not a bad overclock on a budget oriented processor.
We should also point out that the AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor that we reviewed back in September 2009 was able to reach 3.85GHz with 1.55V. It would appear that the AMD Athlon II X4 series can get to roughly 3.8GHz with a little work and a good overclocking motherboard as we've had a few of them up at this clock frequency now on just air cooling.
Next Page - Power Consumption
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - The AMD Athlon II X4 635
Page 2 - The Test System Page 3 - Sandra 2010 Memory Bandwidth Page 4 - PCMark Vantage Page 5 - 3DMark Vantage Page 6 - POV-Ray Page 7 - Photodex Proshow 4.0 Page 8 - Cinebench 10 Page 9 - World in Conflict Page 10 - Colin McRae: DiRT 2 Page 11 - Overclocking the AMD Athlon II X4 635 Page 12 - Power Consumption Page 13 - Final Thoughts and Conclusion |
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