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

Had to back down to 3.2 GHz this week, as the heat had been causing some crashes. Not sure what's heat sensitive and don't have time to do proper diagnostics. I suspect the motherboard might be starting to feel the strain after all these years.

Picked up a Athlon x4 for loose change that will supposedly unlock to a Phenom II X6 but haven't had time to play with it yet. On the other hand I don't have the money for a new rig and there are situations where the higher multiplier and two extra cores might help. That's on the back-burner for now.
 
So 9 1/2 years later I finally retired the FX5200 yesterday.

Replaced with a Ryzen 2700x and Asus Prime B450 Plus bundle (new) I got for about £220. Not quite the same category of bargain as the previous CPU but not bad I guess. However - I ordered a bundle with a 2700 and it's turned up with a 2700x in it. Can't complain for the money.

Edit: Never got around to trying the Athlon X4 640 - but my oldest son would like me to teach him how to build a computer. Not sure where my spare PSU is but the unlocking temptation is still strong...
 
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.
 
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