Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and Athlon 64 FX-60 Review

Overclocking

Since Athlon 64 FX CPUs don’t have a clock multiplier lock, we were very curious in see the overclocking capacity of Athlon 64 FX-60. First we raised its clock multiplier from 13 to 14 and the CPU ran at 2.8 GHz just fine. That’s great news. We tried to increase its base clock (HTT clock) when it was set at 14x but it was almost impossible. The system hanged even with base clock rates as low as 209 MHz. We went back to 13x and increased the CPU base clock and we could go stable up to 218 MHz (2,834 MHz internally – a 9% increase over the standard clock rate). We didn’t play with voltage settings or any other fancy settings provided by the motherboard, so you may be able to achieve better results than we did.

Under these two overclocking situations we ran PCMark05 Professional to see which configuration would give us more performance improvement, see our chart below.

Putting our Athlon 64 FX-60 running at 2.8 GHz by increasing its clock multiplier from 13x to 14x improved its PCMark05 overall score by 4.92% and its PCMark05 CPU score by 7.27%. By keeping the CPU at 13x multiplier and increasing its base clock to 218 MHz, which made it run at 2.83 GHz internally, its PCMark05 overall score was increased by 6.47% and its PCMark05 CPU score was increased by 8.96%.