Athlon Dual Core: Overclocking the 4200+

The Stock and Overclock Tests

To make our performance data as useful as possible, we decided to run the stock 4200+ and the overclocked CPU through our standard motherboard test suite. As Anand has already shown in the launch article for AMD Dual-Core these are not the most revealing tests you can run on dual core. However, the test suite is a fair representation of the types of applications you run today, and it is a set of benchmarks that are very familiar to regular readers. This makes it a revealing set of tests for dual-core and overclocked dual-core performance.

Performance tests were run at stock speed with the 4200+ and at the highest stable overclocked speed that could be achieved with basic air cooling on our test bed. For comparison the same suite of benchmarks were run using the single core 4000+ CPU. In looking at comparisons in the graphs, keep in mind that the 4000+ runs at 2.4GHz versus 2.2GHz for the 4200+. The 4000+ also features 1MB L2 cache compared to 512KB cache on each core in the 4200+.

The test configuration is our most recent DDR memory test bed built around the DFI LANParty nF4.

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s)	AMD Athlon64 x2 4200+ (2.2GHz 512KB cache each) 939 AMD Athlon64 4000+ (2.4GHz 1MB Cache) Socket 939
RAM	2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2
Power Supply	OCZ 520 watt PowerStream
CPU Cooling	Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 HeatSink/Fan
Hard Drive	Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM SATA (8MB Buffer)
Video AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers	nVidia nForce 6.39
Video Card	nVidia 6800 Ultra (PCIe)
Video Driver	nVidia nForce 71.89
Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP2; Direct X 9.0c
Motherboard	DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR

For CPU cooling we used the same Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 HSF fan we have used for recent overclocking tests in motherboard reviews. In looking at our overclock numbers, keep in mind that cooling is just a decent stock Heatsink/Fan. Higher overclock will be achieved with more aggressive cooling like liquid cooling or phase-change.