Overclocking Athlon64 3200+ 90nm On MSI K8N Neo2 nForce3 Ultra Motherboard

AMD silently started releasing lower clocked 939-pin Athlon 64 CPUs about a month ago, which look much more attractive to those of us on a budget. Newegg is now carrying the Athlon 64 3000+ OEM and 3200+ PIB processors priced at $160.00 and $215.00 respectively. Certainly these pricing levels are much easier on the wallet than the $500 and $800 prices we have seen for 939-pin CPUs at launch time… At the time we ran these tests, we could not get our hands on a 3000+, so we utilized an OEM 3200+. It would be my guess that you will realize just about the same results out of both CPUs. Do keep in mind that the 3000+ is clocked at 1.8GHz (9*200) and the 3200+ is clocked at 2GHz (10*200), but these CPUs multipliers are adjustable to lower integers.

The motherboard on the test bench at the time was the MSI K8N Neo2, that uses the nForce3 Ultra chipset. It handled overclocking our CPU very well and did not seem to be holding it back. We also used Corsair PC3200 and PC4000 for our testing.

…You can look at the benchmarks and see that the overclocked Athlon 64 3200+ processor easily closes the performance gap between it and the Athlon 64 3800+ on the same motherboard. The 3800+ PIB is currently retailing at Newegg for over $600. So I guess with a little bit of enthusiast spirit, you can easily squeeze an extra 400 bones out of your 3200+ if you are ready, willing, and able.

Also worthy of noting here is that AMD’s step down to the 90nm process in no way resembles Intel’s Prescott core. While the AMD Athlon 64 at 90nm is not exactly cool, it just comes across as a “normal” Athlon 64 to us that simply does not use as much voltage at their 130nm cousins.

OCing the Athlon64 3200+ 90nm @ HardOCP