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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Puddleglum - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Neermind.. read this in the closing thoughts:"There is one other point to mention on the memory: overclocking with four 512MB DIMMs was almost a complete failure on the setup that we used. Other motherboards, or perhaps a BIOS update for this motherboard, might improve the results, but for now we would recommend caution with such attempts. If you want to run 2GB of RAM, two 1GB DIMMs would be a much better choice."
Good info.
bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Actually, switching supply efficiencies can change dramatically with load; I wouldn't count on the draw at the wall as a good indicator of system load change. The efficiency may change from, say 70% at half-load to 85% at 3/4 load, which, on a 400 watt supply, would show up as: 285.7 watts draw (lower power) and 352.9 watts draw (high power). Now, the system is drawing 50% more power, while the meter is only showing 23.5% more power draw.Something to keep in mind anyway as I don't know exactly what the difference in efficiency for that particular supply is....
Cerb - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
It would be nice to know. However, if it's like the 470w one, it is 'close enough' at all loads.http://www.silentpcreview.com/article173-page4.htm...">http://www.silentpcreview.com/article173-page4.htm...
bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Yeah, from 2-400W it's pretty close. Nevermind me then. :)WRXSTI - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
I cannot wait to get a 64 X2 chip! Maybe by next year is better...Futurebobis - Thursday, December 1, 2022 - link
Yo, sup past people