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The Phenom II X3 710 is no black edition and therefore has a locked multiplier, so we had to use the base clock and HT link to overclock it. Memory was not overclocked as well as the HT link.
By adjusting the base clock to 258MHz we have overclocked the X3 710 with a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 cooler @ 3354MHz.
It ran stable for more than 30 minutes with the Prime95 benchmark. This overclock is an increase of app. 29% which can be considered a good result for such a cheap motherboard.
Going above 258MHz BCLK lead to errors in Prime95. Increasing the vCore voltage to 1.55v did not help much, the processor could not finish prime95, setting the Loadline Calibration to 100% had the same result.
ASUS PC probe CPU temperature was in between 55-58 degrees celsius, and CoreTemp-software and AMD overdrive indicate temperatures of 44-46 degrees celsius
Power Design
On the images above you can see the difference in the Power Design of the M4A78LT-M LE and the M4A78LT-M. While the M4A78LT-M LE has a 3+1 Phase power design, the M4A78LT-M has a
4+1 Phase power design, this will probably also lead to better overclocking results with the M4A78LT-M.
Core Unlocking
Core Unlocking is as simpe as Turbo Key, the ASUS startup screen asks you to press 4 (simply press key #4) and if successful you'll see a screen that indicates that a fourth core (in our case) has been activated.
The 4th core from our Phenom II X3 710 was unlocked without any problems, but core temperatures are not indicated in the Status Monitor of the AMD overdrive utility. Overclocking with 4 cores was no problem.
Since this motherboard only supports CPUs up to 95 watts TDP, (Air) Cooling must be better than the standard AMD cooler if you want to overclock with unlocked cores.
Turbo Key
With Turbo Key all you have to do is press the power button of your computer and the your speed will increase without having to reboot.
The gain was 5% using this tool. Below are the benchmark results for 7zip.
| 7zip -- MIPS (higher is better) Phenom II X3 710 4th core unlocked |
 9285 |
 9776 |
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Turbo Key disabled
Turbo Key enabled
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AMD Overdrive
The AMD Overdrive also lets you increase the CPU speed in real-time. We tried the novice mode and moved the slider to it's highest position: high performance level 10.
The gain however is a lot less than with the ASUS Turbo Key, we only had an increase of about 2%. For real performance you will have to use the expert mode.
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