Test setup

Motherboard: Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
RAM: 4gb Corsair Dominator GT PC3-12800 C7 DDR3
HDD: 250gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: LG Bluray/HDDVD Multidrive
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Hiper Type-R 580w

Overclocking

The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition clocked very nicely. The Asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 used to clock the Phenom II did a great job.

The ASUS motherboard has its own ‘Turbo Key II’ overclocking switch. This allows the board to choose its best stable clock. This first attempt took the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition to a stable clock of 3.712ghz @ stock voltage.

As that proved stable some manual clocking was needed.

I upped the motherboard’s FSB to 250mhz (with the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition’s 16x multiplier should return a clock speed of 4ghz), set the voltage to 1.45v and once again found the clock stable.

Next i used the motherboards other ‘special’ feature. It’s ‘Core Unlocker’ switch – used in tandem with the Turbo Key II the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition unlocked to a full quad core and clocked up to 3.456ghz automatically @ 1.4v.

I tried to run the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition in ‘quad core’ configuration at 4ghz and with 1.45v but the core unlocker throttled the set up down to 3 cores. That was still a 4ghz tri core though – nice little chip this! I’m sure with more voltage a 4ghz quad could be possible.

Temperatures

I monitored temperatures whilst running the overclocks and discovered that the 555 Black Edition ran nice and cool even when heavily clocked.


Temeperatures look good.

Testing

A selection of desktop based hardware tests from Everest’s Ultimate (Trial Edition), Futuremark's PCMark05, WinRAR, 3DMark Vantage and a couple of recent gaming titles.

The following pages will show the results of this testing.