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AMD's January Update - Phenom II X4 975 'Black Edition' & Phenom II X4 840

By Vincent Chang - 10 Jan 2011

Overclocking

Overclocking

With its 'Black Edition' mantle, the Phenom II X4 975 had a reputation to maintain when it came to the overclocking department. From what we saw, it came out looking quite good, with our air-cooled test emerging creditably with a 4.3GHz frequency. This compared well to the 4.04GHz we managed on the 970, but then overclocking is never an exact science. We could have gotten lucky there.

It was not easy to overclock the 840, due to its locked multipliers, which meant that we had to play with the chipset's base clock. Finally, while the overclocking on the 975 was decent, it was still not sufficient to match the Core i5-2400 at its default clock. One thing that AMD has over Intel's non-K processors - you get more leeway when it comes to overclocking.

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