Legit Processor Reviews
AMD Athlon II X2 255 Dual Core 3.1GHz Processor Review
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | AMD Athlon II X2 255 |
| Date: | Fri, Feb 12, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Dan Stoltz - |
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Overclocking the AMD Athlon II X2 255
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 255 processor runs with a 200MHz bus speed and an x15.5 multiplier that is used to reach the final core clock of 3.1GHz. 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 245MHz for a total speed of 3797.5 MHz. Not a bad overclock with no additional adjustments needed.
By cranking the voltage up to 1.6V in the motherboard's BIOS we were able to get the FSB up to 282MHz and reduce the multiplier to x14 and achieve a solid overclock of 3948MHz. It took a lot more voltage to hit this overclock than I like but it was a fairly stable set-up. I was able to break 4GHz with the AMD Athlon II X2 255, although I couldn't get it stable. I do not doubt that the AMD Athlon II X2 255 could break 4GHz and be stable with some time, effort, and a better cooling solution.
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 X2 255 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 needed to adjust several the values 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 27% boost in the speed of the cpu we noticed a boost in the overall score of 1300 3DMarks! Overclocking the Athlon II X2 255 reduced the bottleneck of the system and allowed the graphics card to perform better. Increasing the speed of the processor gave us nearly a 24% increase in the cpu score which is a rather impressive boost.
Looking back to last year, the AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor that we reviewed back in June 2009 was able to reach 3.96GHz with 1.46V. It would appear that the AMD Athlon II X4 series can get to roughly 3.95GHz 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 - AMD Athlon II X2 255 CPU
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 X2 255 Page 12 - Power Consumption Page 13 - Final Thoughts and Conclusion |
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