AMD Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition AM3 Processor Review

Test Setup & Overclocking
Our test system for this processor is our regular AMD test system. The reason for this is that it allows us to keep the continuity throughout all the reviews to ensure that our results are being fairly tested, especially when comparing to other components.

Our test machine comprises of:

AMD Phenom II X2 560
Asus Crosshair IV Formula
4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800MHz
HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo
CoolerMaster Hyper 212+
2 x Kingston V+ Series 64GB SSD (RAID 0)
BFG EX Series 1200 Watt Modular Power Supply
CoolerMaster Lab Test Bench
Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-bit

We will be using various different applications for testing from synthetic benchmarks to the latest gaming benchmarks and the following is a list of the software used:

• AIDA64
• Metro 2033
• 3DMark 11
• Cinebench

We also use other software for measuring certain aspects of the systems performance, including SpeedFan, CPUID Hardware Monitor, CoreTemp and also Prime95 to give 100% load to the CPU so that we can measure the power consumption through a plug-in electricity monitor.

For comparison purposes, we will be comparing the CPU to other processors on the market including offerings from both AMD and Intel to see how the performance is affected from each benchmark/test.

Overclocking
[HR][/HR]As the Phenom II X2 560 is a Black Edition it comes with an unlocked multiplier, this makes overlocking the Phenom II X2 560 much easier as simple overclocking can be achieved by increasing the multiplier and voltage. With a stock speed of 3.3GHz we easily managed to get 4GHz from this processor using a multiplier of 20 and 1.45v which is great for a beginner as it was very simple to achieve. However to see how much more we could get out of the Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition required a combination of a slightly lower multiplier and increasing the processors bus speed, this is therefore requires more advanced knowledge of overclocking and the AMD architecture. With this combination we managed to achieve an impressive overclock of just over 4.1GHz using a multiplier of 19 and 1.5v however it also required an increase in the motherboards northbidge voltage.

We then went on to test this overclock using prime95 for over 15 hours and was totally stable at these setting.

Unlocking
[HR][/HR]

As mentioned previously the Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition is actually a Phenom II X4 with two locked cores, using modern motherboards the majority support unlocking these hidden cores to allow the processor to be used as a Tri or Quad core processor. We tried unlocking our Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition to a quad core processor and it successfully posted and started to load windows but unfortunately it was not stable so our test processor is not capable of working as a quad core. We therefore tried it as a tri core processor and after some testing it found to be totally stable!

To finish off we then went on to find out how far it would go when overclocking as a tri core processor and managed to get almost 4GHz which was tested using Prime 95 for a few hours and found to be stable.

Please note that as you can see from our results unlocking potentially faulty cores can result in an unstable system. We were lucky to be able to get ours stable as a tri core processor however other processors might not unlock at all or result in an unstable system even when only using three cores. Please be aware that unlocking cpu cores is always a risk and proceed only if you know what your doing and with caution. If you have any questions on core unlocking then please ask within our forums, comment on this review or seek other advice.