Investigations into Athlon X2 Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on December 21, 2005 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Synthetic Gaming Performance
Futuremark's 3DMark applications need little introduction. They may or may not reflect actual game performance - depending on which game you're talking about - yet, since enough people use them, then they are worth looking at.
Even with a high-end graphics card like the 7800 GTX 256MB, 3DMark03/05 are largely GPU limited. The earlier version shows a 10% gap between the slowest and fastest configuration, while the 2005 version only shows a 5% difference. On the other hand, the CPU tests scale very well with processor speed and overclocking. There's also a pretty sizable difference between the slowest and fastest memory types - over 10% - and notice that the value RAM actually dropped in performance at the highest overclocks, indicating that memory bandwidth plays a role.
Futuremark's 3DMark applications need little introduction. They may or may not reflect actual game performance - depending on which game you're talking about - yet, since enough people use them, then they are worth looking at.
Even with a high-end graphics card like the 7800 GTX 256MB, 3DMark03/05 are largely GPU limited. The earlier version shows a 10% gap between the slowest and fastest configuration, while the 2005 version only shows a 5% difference. On the other hand, the CPU tests scale very well with processor speed and overclocking. There's also a pretty sizable difference between the slowest and fastest memory types - over 10% - and notice that the value RAM actually dropped in performance at the highest overclocks, indicating that memory bandwidth plays a role.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
This may seem like a stupid question, but you did copy the SuperPi executable into two separate folders, right? Otherwise, the two running processes overwrite each others' data and one will always fail. Anyway, I don't find SuperPi to be a very useful stress test compared to Folding@Home, Prime95, and several other utilities; it just doesn't stress the system out that much IMO.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Yes of course it is in two folders. I realized that the SECOND time I did it Heh.Leper Messiah - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Thats actually a good thing, my X2 3800 does 2.65 at 1.425 vcore stable a rock. Looks like this x2 test is a good average indicator instead of most reviews which have the nice cherry picked silicon.JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Yeah, My Opteron 165 seems to top off at around 2.6GHz with the stock cooler.Araemo - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
If you buy a socket 939 opteron, will it work in a normal NF4/etc mobo?A dual core opteron is tempting if it will work in the standard enthusiast motherboards. Get a nice heatsink and get it nice and toasty, I could turn my heater back off. :) And I hope 2GB RAM sticks go down in price within the next 9 months.. I'm still debating between a sweet laptop or a good overclocker desktop for my next computer, the desktop would be much cheaper, for sure, but it is a pain to take to LAN parties.
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Most NF4 motherboards support the S939 Opteron, yes. Check the manufacturer's site to confirm though.Googer - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
I found it a bit humourous that this http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/athlon...">graphresembles a tent. It reminded me of the days in high school when kids would get fill in the bubble tests and use the answer sheets to do connect the dot drawings.
I wonder if Jarred had too much time on his hands?
kleinwl - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
If you are going to start testing various cooling systems and how they affect max overclock... go ahead and throw in a Seasonic PSU as well. The Seasonic should be rejecting less heat into the case which may make as much difference in overclock as a more efficent Heat Sink. In any case... try it out please!<Note I have a XP-90, with a Antec SmartPower 2.0, on a venice... and I'm curious how such a case temp difference could affect the overclocking potential>
BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
quote: Looking at the different RAM options, it's difficult to make a good case for spending tons of money on memory.I've always thought that spending a lot of extra cash on memory was a bad idea. It pretty much shows no improvement in Fear. It's nice to see a review of the everyday stuff.
Puddleglum - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
The results for Fear looked bizarre. After reading some of the charts where 4xAA is used on games like Battlefield2 and FEAR, which would be a nice feature to show off on a high-end system, the numbers reveal marginal performance.I confess, I'm still using a Ti4200, which is only performing well in games because it's not drawing the DX9 stuff, and I've truly been waiting for an ideal video card to come out that's worth purchasing; but the new cards that are out right now are making it easy to sit back and wait for the hardware/software ratio to become a little more price-competitive.
Also, why is the OCZ PC4800 freaking out with BF2 when the CPU is overclocked to 2.1GHz?