4800+ Brisbane Overclocking

Product: AMD Athlon 64 4800+ X2 Brisbane Core CPU
Provided By: MemoryExpress
Price: ~$250CDN

Introduction:

AMD has been struggling lately due to the overwhelming success of Intel's Core 2 Duo series of processor for the desktop and mobile market.  Intel successfully made the move to a 65nm manufacturing process many months ago, and it appears that AMD is finally following suit.  This move to 65nm also combines a move to a more energy efficient processor design and we're quite excited to see what this new "Brisbane" core offers AMD users in terms of performance and overclockability.  Stay with us as we take a brief look at the new 4800+ X2 processor from AMD and see if it's got the right stuff that can take it into the magic 3.0GHz territory.

About AMD's Brisbane:

The new Brisbane CPU represents a die shrink from 90nm to 65nm and this in turn helps AMD to get more processor dies out of a single wafer.  In terms of performance, we can expect very similar results with earlier 90nm processors.  That being said, there are some differences.  First of all, the Brisbane 4800+ X2 runs at 12.5 * 200Mhz = 2.5GHz instead of the 12 * 200 = 2.4GHz of the Windsor-based 4800+.  Second, the Brisbane packs a mere 512KB of L2 cache per core when the Windsor 4800+ X2 has 1MB of L2 cache per core.  We don't have a 4800+ Windsor core available for testing on our motherboard, so we can't do side-by-side numbers.  Instead, we will take a look and see how well this new 4800+ overclocks.

Below is a chart that shows how these two processors specifications compare:

On the next page we'll quickly go over our test setup and take a look at what kind of overclocking performance you can realistically expect to get out of this processor.  Some people are reporting pretty insane speeds, and we'll see what we can do!