Overclocking things with a twist? That is certainly one way of explaining away the moves being made in this article. I for one, feel that they provided some useful information in general about overclocking AMD chips that would serve you well in any circumstance.

With the advent of easy-to-use commercial vapour phase-change cooling, like Asetek’s VapoChill XE-II, it’s been possible to accelerate your processor to well above its nominal rated specification. Applying that to top-end processors thus gives you a look at what’s coming in the future, before it is ever announced.

AMD recently released their latest Opteron running at 2600MHz, the same speed as the Athlon FX-55. With one Opteron speed hike usually comes the next one on the desktop, which for Athlon FX means 2800MHz and FX-57. Apply the logic above and we can examine the performance of FX-57 before launch, using an existing FX processor and its unlocked multipliers. With FX-55, all that means is the use of the 14x multiplier at the standard 200MHz dHTT (derived HTT, calculated by the use of the base HTT clock and clock divisors). While it’s not quite a front-side bus, since the memory controller always runs at core frequency, it’s close.