AMD Phenom II X4 810 Review

Page 11 - Temperatures and Overclock

We couldn't pass the opportunity to check the overclock capabilities of AMD Phenom II 810 X4. Especially considering it has the same core as 920 / 940, which frequently reach 3.8-4GHz on air, though with less L3 cache and lower TDP (95W instead 125W), which is supposed to translate as less heat and maybe better potential for reaching higher frequencies. Despite this this particular Phenom II 810 Is NOT a Black Edition and comes with locked multiplier. This means that if you want to overclock you could do it only by raising the bus frequency and if you use the marvelous AMD tool - Overdrive, keep in mind it will not allow raising of the processor core voltage. That option is available only for the more expensive BE processor models.

Well, as you ca see our hopes for high frequencies were empty. With the motherboard in our possession we reached a bus frequency of 250MHz, which multiplied by the static multiplier (13) of the model equals to precisely 3250MHz or 25% overclock, which is nothing too impressive, though still not bad. Our colleagues from various hardware sites have reached similar results - between 3GHz and 3.5GHz. The voltage we overclocked at was a little above 1.5V and is the optimal maximum for ensuring long and glorious life for your Phenom II 810. We couldn't determine whether the processor could do better or was this the maximum bus frequency for this motherboard, since this Gigabyte motherboard had gone as far as 260 MHz bus frequency in our lab (with 940 BE), and that apparently varies with different processors. So another motherboard might allow us to squeeze yet another 100-200-300MHz.