The FX-4130 may be clocked higher at stock but that does not necessarily translate into a better, higher overclock. Time will tell, though. AMD have actually raised the TDP of the processor from 95w (FX-4100) to 125w (FX-4130) which means it may not overclock as far due to thermal limitations. However, whilst the performance is increased, the amount of power that the CPU draws is also increased which does seem a little counterproductive in our eyes – but CPUs rarely run at absolute maximum load so this should not be too much of an issue. Even though it does use more power under load (according to the specification sheets), AMD say that it actually uses less power in an idle state. Anyway, lets push this budget chip and see how far it will go with our cooling.

We will be using a maximum of 1.5 volts for our testing. The reason for this is that the AMD CPUs cannot take much more than 62°c before they start to become unstable and therefore we want to stay below that temperature whenever possible. AMD recommend that you use a maximum of 1.55v on these CPUs for 24/7 usage, provided that your cooling can cope. Therefore, we want to stay on the safe side and not push this boundary too much.



We were impressed to see that this budget CPU could hit the 5GHz marker on just 1.5 volts, and pass our entire benchmarking suite without hesitation. However, as you will see in the results, the lack of L3 cache has crippled this CPU in some ways. We did give our FX-4100 a quick blast to see what it could achieve and sadly, it struggled to hit 4.5GHz with the 1.5 volts limitation in place. This may be down to a poor sample which we received but of that we cannot be certain.