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The athlon II X2 240 is no black edition and therefore has a locked multiplier, so we had to use the base clock and HT link to overclock it.
By adjusting the base clock to 245MHZ we have overclocked the II X2 240 with a stock cooler to 3430MHZ.
this was somewhat below the maximum speed without increasing the CPU voltage, it ran stable for more than 2 hours with the 7zip benchmark.
With a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 cooler we were able to reach and 3640MHZ without increasing the vCore voltage and the ASUS PC probe CPU temperature was in between 39-42 degrees celsius.
Since the Cooler Master Hyper TX3 costs around $ 20.- this might be a cooler to consider in a budget system.
We have added the above mentioned overclock settings to our benchmark statistics.
By increasing the vCore voltage to 1.55v and adjusting the base clock and HT link we were able the reach a maximum of 3752MHZ.
Turbo Key
With Turbo Key all you have to do is press the power button of your computer and the your speed will increase without having to reboot.
The gain was about 4.5% using this tool. Below are the benchmark results for 7zip and Far Cry 2 in Frames Per Second with DirectX 10.
| 7zip -- MIPS (higher is better) |
 4660 |
 4979 |
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Turbo Key disabled
Turbo Key enabled
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| Resolution |
Far Cry 2 -- FPS (higher is better) |
| 1280X720 |
20.91 |
| 20.98 |
| 1680X1050 |
14.28 |
| 14.30 |
Video card: Sapphire ATI Radeon 3650
Turbo Key disabled
Turbo Key enabled
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AMD Overdrive
The AMD Overdrive also lets you increase the CPU speed in real-time. We tried the novice mode and moved the slider to it's highest position: high performance level 10.
The gain however is a lot less than with the ASUS Turbo Key, we only had an increase of about 2%. For real performance you will have to use the expert mode.
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