Athlon 64 and its dual-core siblings have never been able to reach higher than slightly north of 4.2GHz, no matter how cold you go. The reasons are several, but one of the main ones are the nasty cold-bugs that spawns from the manufacturing process. Some revisions aren't even capable of negative Celsius, while others can handle down to -80°C on a good day. When AMD decided to unleash the Black Edition series with the 6400+ and 5000+, AMD overclocking was reborn.
Update: Fake, PLL exploit
The coldbugs were still there, but now you could find people running Athlon 64 X2 processors at +3.5GHz with air cooling. That should be fast enough for almost anyone. For long FX-57 had held the crown, but then the results with AMD's new and unlocked Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition started to come in. New ground was broken, but not by much. The record climbed from 4.2GHz to 4.22, to 4.25 and then to 4.26. Minor improvements in others words.
On February 8 an overclocker called kris submitted a valid result of 4851MHz (15*323) with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+. This is quite an achievement and we decided to discuss the matter with CPU-ID before posting and according to them, the result seems genuine, but we will investigate it further. It's just way too good to be considered a record just yet. It's too good to be ignored as well.
According to the submission he used Abit AN-M2HD, based on the NVIDIA GeForce 7050 chipset, to reach this frequency. The AN-M2HD is a good board for overclocking, but we've never seen results like this with it. At the same time, he did not specify an e-mail for anyone to contact him, which makes it even more fishy. But until then, here's the screenshot.
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Athlon 64 X2 5000+ pushed to 4851MHz? Update: Fake
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