Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

BX at 133MHz?

The BX chipset has been around for quite some time now, almost 2 years to be exact. After its debut in May of 1998 one of the most difficult challenges was to push the chipset to the limits by attempting to use, reliably, the 133MHz FSB setting. At the time of the chipset's release, neither the memory nor the AGP cards were capable of hitting that 133MHz setting. Most memory had difficulty running at above 124MHz, and the 2/3 AGP clock divider left the AGP bus running at 89MHz, or approximately 35% out of spec.

Luckily, in the past two years, things have come a long way since then. Motherboard manufacturers have tweaked their BX motherboard designs beyond belief, and graphics card manufacturers have also made their boards more tolerant to various extreme conditions. The result of this all is that it is now possible to run quite a few BX based motherboards at the 133MHz FSB setting without any problems.

Two motherboards that we've highly recommended in particular have been able to hit the magic 133MHz mark, those two are the Microstar BXMaster and the AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold, the latter which we used in this comparison. Keep in mind that not all BX motherboards are capable of running at the 133MHz FSB setting, especially the older ones, and it takes more than a solid motherboard to run at that frequency, your AGP card and memory must be capable of running at the overclocked setting as well.

AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold

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Microstar BXMaster