AMD Athlon Overclocking Guide

Overclocking the Athlon

So how far can the Athlon go? 

Unlike AMD’s K6-X line of CPUs, the Athlon is actually a very good overclocker.  The reason behind this is primarily because AMD has greatly improved the yields on the Athlon in comparison to the initial yields on the K6-2 and K6-III processors. 

The transition from a 0.25-micron process to a cooler running and smaller 0.18-micron process was a very seamless one that took place very recently and helped to reduce the power consumption and heat dissipation of the Athlon CPUs. 

Eventually, you’ll only be able to find 0.18-micron Athlon CPUs, but until then the majority of sub 750MHz Athlons are 0.25 micron chips (0.18-micron chips feature an 'A' at the end of their product code, 0.25-micron chips feature a 'C').  In spite of this, they are still fairly good overclockers. 

Pushing the Athlon seems to be almost entirely dependent on luck of the draw.  There have been numerous reports of Athlon 500s and 550s with 650MHz cores with 3.3ns (300MHz) L2 cache.  It seems like the Athlon 500s and the 550s are the best value right now, especially since the 500s are on their way out and can be bought for under $200. 

The 500s and 550s that we’ve seen generally hit around 650 – 700MHz, but there have been reports of those two chips hitting as high as 800MHz.  The Athlon seems very tolerant to voltages in the 1.60v – 1.80v range (1.60v being its default core voltage), and most overclocks require an increase to around 1.70v in order to maintain stable operation. 

The Athlon 600 is also a very good value at around $250 and you can expect pretty decent overclocking success with that chip, around 700 – 750MHz is what you can expect to hit with most Athlon 600s.  However, as with all overclocking attempts, your mileage may vary. 

Anything faster than the 600 starts dropping in value as the 650 approaches $300 in price and the 700 and higher chips are just too high in price and not as overclockable as we would like them to be.  The 700 – 800MHz chips seem to max out at around 900MHz, which is a very difficult overclock to manage from what we’ve seen. 

The 0.18-micron 750 and 800MHz chips had difficult running at speeds above 850MHz although we were able to get 900MHz out of both CPUs.  Anything above 900MHz was a no-go, even 900MHz required quite a bit of cooling. 

Since we are only dealing with a limited sample space of processors, your best bet to research how far you’ll be able to take your Athlon is to ask around on the message boards and newsgroups to see what other Athlon overclockers have been able to reach.  The AnandTech Forums are just one of many places where you can go to get that kind of information.