Overclocking Potential of up to 3.5 GHz

Traditionally, we always try to push every new processor that comes into our lab to its highest stable frequency. To be honest, we were very pleasantly surprised by the Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition. The previous model, the 6000+ running at 3.0 GHz, reached its limit at 3.28 GHz. The Athlon 64 X2 6400+, on the other hand, reached a maximum stable clock speed of 3.5 GHz. AMD has managed to squeeze another 200 MHz of headroom out of the Windsor core.

We only had to increase the core voltage from 1.44 volts to 1.5 volts in order to overclock the CPU to 3.5 GHz.

In order to reach this speed, we raised the front-side-bus speed from 200 MHZ to 220 MHz.