Overclocking the Athlon II X4 630

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get. The XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 heat sink ($36 air cooling HSF) was used for overclocking as we wanted something a little better than the retail boxed cooler.

Here is a CPU-Z v1.52.2 screen shot of the AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor with all default settings to see what we are going to be overclocking.  The processor has a base clock of 200MHz with a multiplier of 14; that is good for 2.8GHz. 

This is without changing any settings in the BIOS just to see how high we could get with 'AUTO' voltages. By just raising the base clock to 250MHz the system booted up and was found to be rock solid at 3.50GHz. Not bad, but what happens when the CPU Voltage is manually increased?  Can the Athlon II X4 processor be pushed further?

By cranking the voltage up to 1.500V in the motherboard's BIOS we were able to get an extra 11MHz on the bus and reach 3.65GHz on the Athlon II X4 630!

By cranking the voltage up to 1.55V and lowering the HT link down to 8x from 10x we were able to get the system to 3.85GHz thanks to a bus speed of 275MHz.

This is an overclock of nearly 1.1GHz, which is impressive for just air cooling.  The AMD Athlon II X4 620 was also a strong overclocker as we were able to reach just over 3.5GHz with it as well!