Overclocking
While some of the benchmarks might have given away the secret already, let’s explore how well and how easily we were able to overclock our X2 5200+ processor using the Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H.
This CPU-Z shot shows the processor at its default clocks and speeds – the X2 5200+ runs at 2.6 GHz (fast enough for 1080p video processing) using a 13x multiplier and a 200 MHz bus speed. The HT link, which also provides the connection from the CPU to the GPU, is running at 1000 MHz in this instance.
Quick and dirty to the answer: I pushed the bus speed up to 300 MHz, the multiplier down to 9x resulting in a 2.7 GHz clock speed. That is about as close to stock as we could get in clock speed while hitting a standard HT bus speed and without half multipliers on the CPU available anymore. The HT link is running at 1.5 GHz, a 50% increase over reference speeds resulting in better CPU to GPU communication.
The memory is running at CLOSE to the DDR2-800 speeds we were aiming for; the CPU-to-memory speed multipliers are little more confusing than we’d like, but CPU-Z is a big help for us here.
All of this was done without touching any voltages and using standard, AMD stock cooling. I have no doubts that we could overclock this processor even further with the same cooling and system configuration.
