Overclocking

If we do not take into account the gaming tests, we will be able to say with all certainty that the performance of the Opteron 165 processor corresponds to its cost. This is a pretty normal situation, but nothing extraordinary. I wouldn’t call these results a significant argument in favor of this CPU. However, we can change this impression by the overclocking results easily. If Opteron 165 demonstrates pretty decent overclocking potential (at least not worse than Athlon 64 X2 3800+ would have), it can win the enthusiasts?hearts due to its large L2 cache, which may be very important in 3D games.

Therefore, we couldn’t disregard the tests of the CPU’s overclocking potential here. During our overclocking tests we were primarily interested in the results one could obtain without involving any specific cooling systems. Therefore, we only use a standard AVC Z7U7414001 air cooler. Other than that the system configuration we used during overclocking remained the same, as during the Opteron 165 performance tests. We measured the stability of the overclocked Opteron 165 with the S&M and Prime95 utilities.

I would like to point out that AMD limits the clock frequency multiplier of its Opteron processors from the top. It means that we will only be able to overclock Opteron 165 by raising the clock generator frequency. It is important that you have a high-quality mainboard at your disposal, because it should be able to work stably at high clock generator frequencies, as the nominal clock multiplier of our CPU equals 9x. For example, the DFI LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert mainboard based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset proves very reliable at 300MHz clock generator frequency (if the clock frequency multiplier is set at 3x to form the HyperTransport frequency. Therefore, in this case it suits perfectly well.

So, first of all we decided to find out the frequency our Opteron 165 will work at without any additional Vcore increase. The processor potential proved very attractive even in this case. Without any additional efforts (except the lowering of the HyperTransport clock frequency multiplier and increasing of the memory frequency divider) we managed to get our CPU work stably at 280MHz clock generator frequency. In other words, the CPU proved stable and working at 9x280MHz=2520MHz clock frequency withoutany additional Vcore increase.

This is a very nice result I should say. The Toledo based CPU working at 2.5GHz frequency is something to be really proud of. However, we didn’t feel like we could stop at this point. We decided to overclock our Opteron 165 CPU even higher by raising its Vcore from 1.325V to 1.45V. In this case the clock generator frequency when the system remained stable rose by another 11MHz and reached 291MHz. In other words, our CPU could work stably at 9x291MHz=2622MHz with hgiher Vcore.

So, thanks to the new clock frequency and the Toledo core used for our Opteron 165 processor we could overclock our CPU by about 1.5 times. In other words, this processor is a great choice for any overclocker. On the one hand, it costs not that much, and on the other hand, it can be easily overclocked to the frequency of the top dual-core AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor.

By the way, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processors based on Manchester core can boast pretty much the same overclocking potential. On average, they overclock to 2.6-2.7GHz frequency. And it means that Opteron 165 would be a better buy than Athlon 64 X2 3800+ if we take into account the overclocking potential. Firstly, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly, it features a larger L2 cache that ensures higher performance.