The guys at Xtremesystems forum have managed to overclock the $140 three-core AMD Phenom X3 720 all the way to 4.2GHz. They even got the CPU-Z 3.0 validator to second the score.

The guys used Gigabyte's GA-MA790GP-DS4H, an AMD 790GX based motherboard, and set the multiplier to 21 and bus speed to 200MHz. Going over 4.2GHz is really an awesome score, especially if you take into account the relatively low price of the platform. The rest of this OC beast included 2x2g OCZ Gold modules doing 5-5-5-15 2.1v @ 1066, PC P&C 750, 2 X hd4850 512mb, OCZ Vindicator, 36gig Raptor,Benq DL DVD burner.

Obviously this overclocker, known as chew* on the forum, likes OCZ but his second machine does have an Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz so he still likes Intel too.

You can check the validator here and the rest of the details how he got to that amazing speed here. Good job chew*, and we certainly hope we can achieve some similar speeds in our test environment.