After I had run the benchmarks at stock settings it was straight in at the deep end and onto the overclocking. There are a 2 basic ways to overclock a CPU from within the bios and using software from within windows. AMD themselves offer some software to help those that are a little wary of delving into the motherboards BIOS. This software is called Overdrive and we at Xtreme have used it before whilst looking at AMD’s Phenom II 955BE so as to not repeat the info we gave before you can find out more about it HERE.

Using the Overdrive software I was able to achieve the following overclock. A 10% overclock whilst not exactly impressive isn’t bad for a software overclocking tool. I put the relatively mild overclock down to the fact there are no memory dividers available and 220 x 8 is 1760mhz which is the max I could get out of this memory in its own review, ergo why I could go no further.

So the next stop was the bios to see what I could do from there.

Unfortunately it soon went a bit wrong. It would seem the on board graphics doesn’t play nice at over 225Mhz FSB and I couldn’t see a way of fixing it so I had to fit a graphics card to get the most out of the X4 620 but once I had done that it FLEW. That in mind though completely invalidated my “stock” PCMark Vantage score so I reran it with the graphics card installed.

I was soon at 250FSB which more or less equates to the stock speed of a Phenom II 955 so I decided that would be a nice place to stop and do a direct comparison. Remember this is still at stock core voltage so hopefully there is still room for improvement.

Once I have rerun the benchmarks I will do one final push for the max speed I can achieve with the X4 620.

After a bit more tweaking and a slight bump in voltages across the board the highest overclock I could achieve was 3.7Ghz. Which I have to say is quite impressive given the relatively little time I had to spend on it.

With a little more time and maybe a touch more voltage then maybe a 50% overclock is on the cards. I don’t know what the max safe voltage is on these chips I couldn’t find a definite answer so I kept it conservative.

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