Athlon X2 5200+ 45nm AM3 may unlock to Phenom FX5200

[gamesaregood]

That's some really good value for money you got out of that CPU!

I still have my 5200+ with a motherboard stored somewhere safe, only retired it from the spare PC a few months ago after picking up a second hand 2011 board with a third gen i7 3820 at I price I couldn't say no to!

I'm sure I will build it into a PC again at some stage though.

 

[RevBillyG]

Funny this should be resurrected. Just retired an AMD 550BE which was unlocked to quad core and clocked to 3.1ghz.
Bought from MM on here many moons ago. Might repurpose it for a retro emulation station....

 

[Uriel]

I'm not sure I'll ever do something like this again. I'm far more time restricted than cash restricted these days. Just don't really want to commit again to the careful and painstaking process it took to max out this chip and rigorously test it in order to ensure I could count on its long-term reliability.

As for quantifying the performance increase from unlocking a dual core chip with no L3 cache to a quad with L3 cache and overclocking by 50% plus - I don't think we'll ever see the likes of it again. For games or programs that could properly take advantage of 4 vs 2 threads it could mean over a 3x performance increase from stock settings. Compared to this '14 of the most legendary overclocking CPUs' roundup https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/picturestory/636-best-overclocking-cpu.html the performance increase beats everything there. The Phenom II x2 550BE gets a mention but that had a higher clock and L3 cache in the first place - and you'd pay a lot more for them.

With a stronger motherboard I think this could have been sitting around 3.8 GHz. Outstanding chip really. I can't think of anything else where there was such a huge difference made by unlocking and overclocking a CPU. Well there was the AM2 based X2 5000+ that unlocked to a Phenom FX-5000 but the example I had needed some serious voltage on the CPU-NB to stabilise the L3 cache and consequently ran rather warm.

And it's quite staggering how long my FX-5200 remained a viable chip at 1920x1200 with a GTX 970 and the graphical settings cranked up as much as possible, at least in terms of raw performance. The GPU was still frequently the primary bottleneck. It's perhaps reflective of how weak the CPUs were in the Xbox One and PS4 but in most multiplatform games, I was still running with settings on par or better than the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X (no plans to get a better monitor yet so no 4k). However an increasing number of games require SSE 4.1 and 4.2 now so it hit a dead-end. Perhaps if I'd gone for an LGA1366 platform at the time, I might have still been using it but for what I paid, I can't complain.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

My father in law was running one of the x2/3 chips that unlocked to a quadcore B50 until about a year ago, when he upgraded to my old system (a 2700K at 4.7/8GHz all core, hell of an upgrade). We dug out the CPU and motherboard recently as he'd kept it just incase, but think he has retired it now, as if it fails he will be better off getting something new at this point, with CPUs beginning to move forward again these last few years.

Still was a fully working motherboard, RAM, CPU and Gelid Tranquillo, had definately done its time, and too obsolete to really want to put it in anything now. Even my file server is running a sandybridge i3.