Thread: How much can I overclock an AMD Athlon II Regor 3.0Ghz CPU?

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Ascendant

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The processor I currently have is:

AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Processor

I'm looking to overclock this thing some for gaming purposes, but at the same time I have a concern for burning it out as I can't afford a new CPU at this time. I'm currently using the heatsink that came with the CPU. I do have another one but from what I had read when I purchased the CPU at the time, their heatsinks were getting great feedback and worked even better than some purchased from other companies. To save myself the trouble, I just went with the stock heatsink though I do have another I used to use. Don't have the name off the top of my head but I can get it later if people feel it would be a wise idea to go with something better for overclocking.

Anyway, don't wanna push the CPU too hard, just within a safe range where I will get a performance increase but not at the expense of risking damage to the CPU. Any suggestions from individuals with experience on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
 
To start off, what are your current idle and load temperatures for the CPU? Use a program like Intel Burn Test (run 5 tests on Maximum) to get the highest possible load temp.
 
Those run quite cool, I'm from 2.8 to 3.6 on a 95w cpu with a mid level air cooler. I would suspect if your board and ram are up to the task 3.8 or higher would be well within your grasp.
 
With those little dual cores you shouldn't have any problems pushing it up to 3.6 or 3.8.
I was able to get mine up to 3.6 on a board with 3 chokes total (which is horribly insufficient).

On any decent midrange board you should be able to push those up close to 4ghz or more.

If the games you're playing are already slow then you'll see a decent improvement. I think most newer games are more GPU dependant than anything else.

It's mostly the fact that your chip is 2 cores that is limiting you I think. In single or dual threaded apps or games your chip should do just fine keeping up, but when you go to open WoW, PS2 emu, Wii emu, 3 web browsers, and Coretemp (this is just an example) your system is going to choke.

To get any sort of decent increase in performance you'll have to overclock that thing to at least 3.4ghz+, and to do that you'll need to play with the FSB (I don't know what the **** they call it these days, it's stock 200mhz on AMD chips though).

If you're using a budget board you're not going to be able to raise the FSB much without issues, and you have to remember that when overclocking via FSB that the memory controller, HT link, and memory are ALL going to increase in frequency as the FSB increases.

To prevent memory bottlenecking you be sure to reduce it at least 1 step before you overclock. Increasing vNB a bit will help as well, and don't rush! Take it 5mhz at a time until you reach the point of instability, and then work from there by either increasing CPU voltage a bit, increasing vNB a bit, or reducing memory timings, or frequency.
 
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