AMD OverDrive now a bit more official

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 8th February 2008

AMD's new OverDrive website lets you download its utility... elsewhere.

If you own one of the latest AMD 700-series chipsets and either an Athlon 64 X2 or Phenom CPU, you should already know about AMD’s OverDrive software. If not, there’s never been a more perfect time to try it out!

Not much has changed though, to be honest; it’s still in beta (the same version we looked at in our Phenom 9600 Black Edition review) and AMD doesn’t even host the file directly – that’s left to the kind people at Asus and TechPowerUp - all AMD has really done is launch a website.

AMD includes some screenshots and a video explaining it, but unfortunately it’s essentially just a marketing portal - there’s no detail about how to use it effectively, or at least, links to websites that have covered it.

Whenever we have looked at the software we’ve always been impressed, and it seems to go from strength to strength, although beta is absolutely the correct term since it’s still quite buggy in places. You can even turn off the TLB, if you want, not that you’ll ever really come in contact with the erratum unless you’re running some extensively heavy workloads on a B2 stepping Phenom.

However, the ability to change a huge array of performance features in a simple and relatively easy to navigate piece of software that can be common to a variety of motherboards is exceptionally welcome.

Have you used AMD's OverDrive utility? Impressed with it or is proper overclocking only done from the BIOS? Let us know your thoughts, in the forums.