Introduction

"Computer Enthusiast” is a term that gets kicked around a lot these days, and it seems its meaning has quite a few variables and tends to be subjective. Let’s take, for example, an individual who purchases a custom made gaming PC from one of today’s top end esoteric manufacturers. The rig comes laid out with three Fermi cards in SLI, a Core i7 Extreme CPU overclocked from the factory, 16GB of RAM, all the bells and whistles, along with a price tag of $6,000.00 or so. Would this individual necessarily be a “computer enthusiast”? In the literal sense of one with great enthusiasm, I would assume so. You need to be pretty enthusiastic to drop that kind of cash. Now, what if that individual was using this computer strictly for web surfing, document writing and some MMO playing? Still an “enthusiast”? And if this computer locked up and required a call to tech support, if the owner replied to the tech “what’s a BIOS?”….still an enthusiast? Or just someone with excess cash to spend on a computer?

Personally, I stick with the more classic view of the “computer enthusiast.” And, no, I am not referring to anything that has to do with Star Wars or Dungeons and Dragons. I am talking about the individuals who tinker and tweak what they have, in order to get the most performance out of every component. The ones who buy a processor with a slower out of the box clock speed, but know it has architecture for better overclocking. The ones who buy RAM based on actual achievable speed rather than out of the box rated speed. The ones who never stop tweaking and keep researching and experimenting to get their system tailored to exactly how they want it to run. These are the individuals who truly make use of a CPU with an unlocked multiplier, like those in the AMD Black Edition series of chips.

AMD offers the Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition as a 3.2Ghz dual core as a part of their line aimed squarely at enthusiasts. With an unlocked multiplier, the Phenom II X2 555BE comes out of the box already looking to be overclocked and pushed to its limits. Don't let the fact that it is a dual core deceive you, the Phenom II X2 555BE has all of the Phenom II architecture, including 1MB of L2 cache and 6MB L3 cache that go along with it and a 128-bit memory controller that is ready for DDR3. The Phenom II X2 555BE also contains four physical cores on the chip, and the possibility of unlocking an extra core or two is a very real one.