AMD Athlon Overclocking Guide

Conclusion

The Athlon 500, 550, and 600 are all very cost effective overclocking contenders.  With the success rate of getting each of these CPUs up to the 650 – 750MHz range increasing very rapidly, the investment in an overclocking card seems to be definitely worth it. 

As more motherboards are released with overclocked FSB settings, the combination of that and Athlon overclocking devices will take overclocking and tweaking the Athlon to a new level.  While the Athlon is still not as overclockable as Intel’s FC-PGA, it comes pretty close.  As time goes on, the yields on the Athlon CPUs will continue to increase and the overclocking potential of these CPUs will definitely go up.

The advent of H. Oda’s WCPUA2 software that adjusts the L2 cache divider on the fly has made overclocking the Athlon even better, and if the rumors of being able to control the clock multiplier through software are true, then this could definitely take overclocking the Athlon to the next level.  Unfortunately, there is a downside to all of this progress with overclocking on the Athlon platform. 

The inevitable truth is that AMD will most likely have to pursue some sort of anti-remarking tactics in order to prevent remarked processors from being sold to consumers that aren’t aware of their overclocked state.  Whether this comes in the form of multiplier locking or something else cannot be predicted, but in the end, something has to be done.  Until then, let’s enjoy our finally overclockable Athlon CPUs.