AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition AM3 Processor Review

Overclocking
This processor runs at 3.2GHz stock using a 200MHz bus speed and 16 multiplier. As this CPU is a Black Edition it does have the ability to up the multiplier as it features an unlocked one. You can however, as per normal increase the bus speed or indeed do a mixture of both to get a steady, stable overclock.

We decided to go into this overclock with the maximum voltage that AMD recommend at 1.5V. Obviously we could take this further depending on our cooling, but the majority of viewers reading this article will be using air cooling. We found that an overclock of 4.08GHz was easily obtainable but no matter what options we changed thereafter a higher stable overclock was no possible.

We were able to boot into Windows at 4.1GHz to start our stress tests, but they soon failed, and 4.2GHz was also bootable but flaked almost straight away leaving us with a still nice overclock at 4.08GHz.

We were also able to unlock this processor into a fully fledged quad core, yet overclocks were quite minimal, even with extra voltage, but if you’re planning on running the CPU at stock, the two extra cores can be quite handy indeed.