Overclocking an Athlon 240GE
Overclocking an Athlon 240GE
So, the Athlon 240GE cannot be overclocked as it has a locked multiplier, well ... at least that should have been the case. We're testing on a B450 board with the latest BIOS and, guess what, not only could we run the memory stable at 3333 MHz, it's unlocked on the CPU multiplier as well, thank you MSI; as with that enabled multiplier we managed to get a proper ~4.0 GHz out of the two cores at a voltage of 1.4 volts.
Both the Athlon 220GE and 240GE produce the same results, so if your aim is to tweak, go with the cheaper model available would be our advice.
You guys know it - when you're gonna tweak, always invest in good hardware. And that includes a proper MOBO/PSU/Memory and cooling, the cheaper motherboards often are not well tuned for enthusiast overclocking with fewer power phases. Please, never underestimate a good power supply and, sure, proper processor cooling. Overclocking with a more core processor (doesn't matter if that is Intel or AMD) is more difficult than you expect it to be. You could apply a fixed voltage.
What you need to do:
- Enable and start at 3600 MHz (37x Multiplier)
- Apply ~1.40V to the CPU (or simply leave it at auto)
- Enable XMP on your memory kit and give that a go
A small tip
Keep in mind I mentioned voltage tweaking, the reality is that leaving the motherboard on auto and altering just the CPU multiplier is sufficient as well. We booted at 4000 MHz on ALL cores. We ended at 4000 MHz with 1.40v.
By manually tweaking that, you can probably settle at 1.40v. Again, we used a stock cooler here, 4000 MHz did run stable with the stock cooler.
Below, some new benchmark results based on the overclock.
Tweaked we see 451 points with both cores at 4000 MHz. Coming from ~399 points at defaults.
386 seconds for a full prime 1024M run coming from 435. That's substantial.
So, 6776 was the Time Spy Score with 2048 on the CPU, we now bump up towards 7340 points with 2287 on the CPU score. Obviously, this was managed with the RTX 2080 Ti used as a dedicated graphics card.
Tweaking did add another 25 Watts of power consumption - that's under 100% load of course and with a big-azz RTX 2080 Ti sitting on top of that petite motherboard and the small proc.
