AMD Athlon II X4 640 & X4 610e Review - PAGE 11

Overclocking

If one recalls the overclocking of the Athlon II X4 635, it reached 3683MHz fully stable, and it could boot up to 3800MHz. Well, it seems the third revision also helped the Athlon II die a lot. By playing with both the processor multiplier and the HT link reference clock, the X4 640 exceeded its predecessor by a nice 100MHz. The memory controller also performed much better.

Here are the final settings used:

• Baseclock of 270MHz
• CPU multiplier of x14, for a clock of 3780MHz
• HT multiplier of x10, for a clock of 2700MHz
• Memory ratio of 3:8, for a clock of 1440MHz
• NB multiplier of x10, for a clock of 2700MHz
• CPU voltage of 1.525V
• CPU-NB voltage of 1.35V

As for the Athlon II X4 610e, a different approach has been taken, as it is a low power edition processor. Overclocking it like crazy would go against its low-power capability since it increases considerably the power consumption. Instead, to remain in the "low power consumption spirit", voltages have been kept at stock. It is also interesting to see if the power usage can further be reduced while staying at stock frequencies.

Here is the highest overclock achieved on stock voltages:

• Baseclock of 246MHz
• CPU multiplier of x11, for a clock of 2706MHz
• HT multiplier of x10, for a clock of 2460MHz
• Memory ratio of 3:10, for a clock of 1640MHz
• NB multiplier of x10, for a clock of 2460MHz
• Stock CPU voltage
• Stock CPU-NB voltage

It could also be undervolted by some nice amount. While keeping AMD Cool'n'Quiet enabled, the processor voltage was set at 1.00V in the BIOS. As a reminder, the stock setting is 1.075V. This resulted in:

• 2400MHz @ 0.992V
• 800MHz @ 0.768V

To make sure 800MHz at 0.768V was stable, the advanced power settings of the power plan in Windows were modified so that the processor would be locked at that speed when running OCCT. For some reason, the Gigabyte BIOS would not allow the x4 multiplier to be selected.