Creating a gamebeast : the Athlon FX-53 at 3 ghz


When my good friend Gamer made his “Overclocking the P4 to 4Ghz" article, showing off the power of a phase changed setup, it occurred to me that although his setup was blazingly fast, using it for pure gaming would probably just match the performance of an Athlon FX-53 running at default speed.


Well, we all know that in desktop computing that little thing called hyper threading makes a BIG difference, but I never read my e-mail when I’m pulverizing cacodemons in Doom 3, and I NEVER surf when chased by tons of mercenaries.

When all your computing power can go to ONE application, there’s little in the way of an FX-53, especially when that ONE application is a high-end game. As I am an avid gamer, my next step was quite obvious :-)

But buying an FX-53 and leaving it at default must be one of the most boring things to do, so we needed the cooling power to chill the thing to subzero, and clock it to at least the equivalent of a theoretic FX-59. What's better than a nice Asetek Vapochill Light LS to get the job done?

In come the parts:

Socket 939 AMD Athlon FX-53 (default clock 2400 MHz (12*200) with, like all FX-processors, the possibility of upward clocking through multipliers)

main board: Asus A8V deluxe, sporting the Via KT800Pro chipset for socket 939.

We needed some ram with that, and as we planned to clock for these tests with only multiplier adjustments to clearly link with future processors, we used 1 gigabyte of dual channel Corsair PC3200 XL, sporting very tight timings of 2-2-2-5 at 200Mhz

video card: Asus X800 XT Platinum Edition

We cooled the Athlon beast with the Asetek Vapochill Light Speed phase change cooler

Throw in a Superflower 520Watt PSU and a Western Digital Raptor 74Gb and you’re all set for Armageddon.

Making the small calculation, this is well over 3000 Euros of hardware at the time of writing. If that doesn’t get us a plenty o’ frames every second, then what will?


side view of the abomination