Performance Boost Of Up To 18.5 %
The performance boost that we achieved through overclocking is considerable. Increasing the CPU clock speed by 500 MHz yields a 14.3% performance increase. Brave souls that overclock their Black Edition by 700 MHz will see performance improve by 15.8%.
Almost As Fast As The E6550 And The 6000+
When it is overclocked to 3.10 GHz - where a core voltage tweak is not yet necessary and power dissipation lies at 75 watts - the 5000+ Black Edition offers very good performance.
At this speed, the Black Edition can narrow the lead of Intel's Core 2 Duo E6550 to only 2.5%. It also catches up with its sibling, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, trailing it by only 2.8%.
Due to its smaller L2 cache size of only 512 kB per core, it loses a lot of ground to the Core 2 Duo processors. However, as the video and audio encoding benchmarks show, cache isn't everything; here, the AMD CPU takes back some of the lost terrain.
Considering that you can overclock this processor with no effort whatsoever and don't even need to tinker with the FSB (thanks to the unlocked multiplier), AMD is basically giving its customers a free performance upgrade out of the box.
