Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 BE review

Overclocking

The new Athlon II is clocked at 3GHz with 1.325V Vcore, the Phenom II is clocked a bit higer with 3.1GHz but with a lower VCore of 1.300V. This is still high VCore with a 45nm CPU, but temperatures are below 40°C when not overclocked. Of course, if your board supports it, you can under-voltage on your own.

Overclocking is a piece of cake, just raise the FSB and you are good to go. The Black Edition is multiplier-free, so you can go up without altering any other settings, but where’s the fun in that?

We could boot up both CPUs with 4GHz, but sadly they were not stable. That forced us to stick with 3.9GHz:

The memory is of course overclocked too:

With the amazing MSI board, we could run power efficent Cool’n'Quiet while still overclocking:

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