With the Intel Core 2 Duo ruling the performance charts it seems impossible to get any worthy scores with an AMD Athlon 64 system? Let´s see what a low end 3000+ Venice AMD CPU can pull of once we go for the extreme overclocking levels.

Overclock Gear

Let’s start of with gathering the components for our OC build, with AMD dumping their prices and people upgrading to higher end Intel/AMD systems it becomes quite feasible to build a complete system “on the cheap”.

DFI LP NF4 Ultra-D and SLI-D Motherboards

2* 256Mb PC3200 DDR1 Winbond BH-5 Memory Modules

Tagan 520W Power Supply

10kg of Dry Ice and Copper Tube for extreme cooling

All this lined and ready for testing on my desk:



Wait… am I missing something in my OC build list? The CPU of course!

AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939 3000+ Venice [CBBLE 0512 BPBW]

With AMD asking quite silly prices for new S939 processors I turned to the Buy&Sell section of different hardware forums, I stumbled upon this Athlon 3000+ unit and was quite interested when the seller told me the CPU does not have a “coldbug”, which prevents the CPU from working correctly at very low temperatures. Seeing as I had 10kg of Dry Ice waiting in the fridge I bough the CPU and had it up and running in the DFI motherboard with simple air cooling.

The 3000+ has a default operating speed of 1800Mhz, increasing the FSB yielded quite a nice result, before I knew it the CPU was running over 2800Mhz, but the heat generated by this little furnace was too much for air cooling… time for more extreme methods.

Here are the “base” results with Air Cooling:


Hexus PiFast: 42.66s


SuperPi 1M: 29.532s


SuperPi 32M: 28m 28.625s