So many years passed since my last attempt to defend my overclocker title that I can’t even count them. Ahhh so many memories, so much passion for getting better benchmark numbers than anybody else… And then family,responsibilities,lack of free time came to my life and suddenly the overclocking hobby-addiction became past. Until the last few weeks! Haha! I was looking for something to cheer me up and also there was a need at home for a small pc for basic stuff like internet browsing and office usage. After a small research I decided to try the new kabini platform from AMD.  A pair of AMD Athlon 5350 at 2.05Ghz and an Asus AM1I-A motherboard. Best thing the price! Only 65euros! Cpu,vga,motherboard for 65euros! Unbelievable. And then… crazy thoughts came to my mind for a supercharged AMD Athlon 5350!

Motherboard and Amd Athlon 5350 arrived:

 

Through UEFI Bios overclocking is such an easy task that even my kid can find the setup limits in a matter of hours. So with the tiny stock cooler I was able to overclock that little beast from 2.05Ghz to 2.700Mhz. Results in Cinebench shows comparable performance to Intel Q6600. Yes you may say that q6600 was ages ago in the market but then think that I am talking for a 25watt quad processor with a price of only 40 euros! At that speed the system was able to do any task. I even loaded Visual Studio 2013 and did some compiling without big delays.

And then the overclocker woke inside me! I digged in my closet and I was able to find some old watercooling parts.

 

Unfortunately the good old Eleven Crusader waterblock wouldn’t fit without modifications so I decided to switch to a Nexxos Vga waterblock and here is the result.

 

Temperature dropped around 10 degrees in full load and this allowed me to push the cpu a little bit higher:

So you may ask what these numbers mean? For comparison I’ll tell you that the Amd Athlon 5350 running at 2.800Mhz is comparable to small Intel i5 and Intel i7.

I am definitely happy with the scores I got and to be honest I wasn’t expecting it. If you ask me this combo is ideal as an htpc setup , or small file server or as a daily usage pc  even with light gaming. Good Job AMD!