By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

There are two things we really love here at RTN: AMD and Overclocking. So, for those eager to not only run a dual core Athlon X2 3800+ CPU but want to run it HARD, this is your day. The gang at Legitreviews.com have done a little overclocking. Read on:
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By Rich Caporali
“While the majority of users will appreciate the benefits of dual core for ~$374, the enthusiasts among us are looking to squeeze ever last bit of performance out of this processor.

Test System:
* DFI Lan Party NF4 Ultra motherboard
* 1 GB Corsair XMS 3200XL memory
* ATI Radeon X850 XT video card
* Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB HDD
* Koolance Exos-2 (CPU, Chipset, Video Card, and HDD cooled)

The DFI board will use the 623-3 BIOS found at DFI Street as well as Nividia’s 6.66 Chipset Driver. ATI’s Catalyst 5.7 drivers were used for the video card, and finally Windows XP with SP 2.

While this processor came from AMD it is undoubtedly a top overclocker, please look at this as the high end you might achieve with your processor. I will run the following benchmarks, along with some gaming that will put the system under prolonged load and test its stability.
* 3DMark05 (CPU Test)
* 3DMark03 (CPU Test)
* Aquamark 3 (CPU Test)
* Sisoft Sandra 2005 (CPU Arithmetic)
* Super Pi Mod 1.4
* Cinebench 2003
* Far Cry
* Doom 3

When overclocking, the best advice is really some old advice, isolate, then consolidate. what this means is we will find the max overclock for the CPU, board, and memory individually, then consolidate them to find the best balance between each component in our system. To cut directly to the chase, here is an excellent overclocking article for an AMD 64 system, written by ThunDA at DFI Street, with each step clearly explained. Since we are using a fully water cooled system, our overclock should end up being close to the max for this processor.

First, we are simply going to overclock the 3800+ to 4800+ frequencies (2.4GHz). Using a minimum voltage increase (1.4V), setting the HTT to x4, and keeping the memory timings as tight as possible (1:1 @ 2-3-3-6), we’ll judge the 3800+ in our benchmarks against the $1100 4800+.

Then, we’re going to do the simplest overclock possible, by simply raising the FSB/HTT frequency as high as possible with a 1:1 divider and memory timings of 2.5-3-3-7. 252FSB/HTT frequency was as high as I could stabily go, though that may have been limited by my memory. HTT was left at x4.

Read the Complete and Very Detailed How-to Here