AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core Processor Review

Overclocking

I only did some minor overclocking with the Athlon 64 4400+ as I didn’t have enough face time with it to go very deep into the cooling setup.  Using the stock air cooling that comes with the FX-55 processor, I was able to push the base frequency on the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ from 200 MHz to 240 MHz with only minor jumps in the voltage.  That gave me an overclocked total frequency of 2.64 GHz, a 440 MHz increase over the original 2.2 GHz. 

While from my quick overclocking experiences I can’t come to a very dramatic conclusion to how the X2 processor is going to perform once enthusiasts have their hands on it, I can say that I was able to get to this limit very easily, but getting over it seemed nearly impossible.  I even tried to hook up the Koolance system to it quickly but that didn’t seem to help the situation.  Perhaps a board with more Vcore options would have done the trick, but I am going to wait for retail available processors to see for sure.

Overclocked Benchmarks

I ran a few benchmarks on the overclocked X2 4400+ to see what the frequency increase does for us.

Running at over 2.6 GHz the dual core X2 4400+ was able to out pace the Intel 840 XE by about 5 seconds. 

In our DivX encoding test, the overclocked CPU did better by 17% over the stock 4400+. 

Interestingly, though our clock rate increase was only 20%, our multitasking test shows a 21.3% increase in performance!