Today we are fortunate to review what AMD claims is the fastest default clocked Dual Core CPU with the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition. Last year we saw a tremendous surge in mainstream Phenom II CPU's from AMD with also the release of lower power consumption Athlon II CPU's. The Phenom II X2
555 BE is actually a newer faster revision of the Phenom II X2 550. It is also a 45nm, 80Watt CPU but comes clocked at a default 3.2 Ghz which is truly fast! As usual this CPU uses the AM3 socket and is backwards compatible with AM2+ motherboards (check your motherboard manufacturerfor a BIOS upgrade and compatibility) and is thus flexible to be used with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory depending on the motherboard you end up using. Similar to the previous review of the AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE which we did last year we will attempt going beyond the traditional benchmarks that only use default clock settings, but we will unlock all 4 cores and overclock the CPU with minimal increase in the CPU voltage. The Phenom II X2 555 BE is using a revision C3 silicon, which has hardware C1E and promises to give greater overclocking results.