Slightly Acceleration

As far as new technology and manufacturing process are concerned, nothing new should be expected from this CPU. Simply put, they’ve proven themselves to be excellent products, with a nice overclock potential and the possibility of unlocking the fourth core, all of which made the presentation of a faster model a logical move. In November, we talked about the Athlon II X3 435 CPU, its possibilities, technology and performance. The main feature was the possibility of unlocking the fourth core, providing you with a native quad-core processor at the 80€ price point, and in some cases, even a full Phenom II X4 Deneb core with the L3 cache memory completely functional, at just over half its price.

Just like with the 435, the 440 doesn’t possess L3 cache, and the main difference compared to the previously presented models is that its frequency is rounded up to 3 GHz. The well-known Rana core, manufactured in the 45 nm manufacturing process, displays itself in all its glory here, with the highest clock thus far. Thermal dissipation was contained within the 95 W standards, as well as the rest of the characteristics, identical to the 435.

Speeding Up and Unlock

A slightly higher frequency brought improvements over the first CPU below, separated by a mere 100 MHz difference in clocks, the results of which can be seen in the accompanying chart. After the first battery of tests was done, we got down to experimenting with the maximum clock this triple-core CPU can withstand. Although the CPU booted even at clocks above that value, the maximum stable frequency we managed to achieve with the CPU without an increase in voltage was 3.8 GHz. We stress “without an increase in voltage” because this particular model didn’t seem to care much about the extra power we were feeding to it (within the limits deemed safe by AMD). An entire 20% increase in clock brought a notable performance improvement, in synthetic benchmarks as well as in realistic conditions, ranging from 5% to just over 20%. Being that the nominal voltage remained unchanged, the processor remained cool, so even though we used a large cooler with the push-pull system in order to secure an adequate temperature for overclocking needs, we’re all but certain that the regular box cooling would have no trouble at all coping with the frequency we’ve managed to obtain.

After toying around with overclocking, we tried to unlock the fourth core, since the motherboard used for testing had the advanced clock calibration options available, but failed, even after setting everything up manually, which brings us to the conclusion that the model we received was one of the impossible ones to unlock. The heatspreader bore the mark “AADAC”, which tells us that the X3 at hand was an X3 from the Propus mask, one that physically has no L3 cache, but we hoped that we’d at least be able to unlock the sleeping fourth core. Should you be able to actually choose your own CPU out of these, we suggest that you go after a model with C as the third letter (Deneb) or A (Agena), whereas D is reserved for Propus.