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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TheHolyLancer - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
i that since this is an OC thread, they should have used a DFI NF4 Ultra-D or a Expert, they have a 4V jumper that allows you to take DRAM voltage into 4 V (i hope no one does though)JarredWalton - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
The higher voltages would have helped the VX RAM a bit. I may shift to a LanParty SLI-DR for the cooling test... or at least try it at some point to see how much of a difference it makes in performance.KingofCamelot - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
I noticed that the BF2 demo file for v1.12 did not work. The bf2bench.demo file needs to be changed for it to work. The bf2bench.demo file can be opened in Notepad, and the following changes need to be made.These lines:
demo.camerafile mods\bf2\Demos\jw112.bf2cam
demo.demofile mods\bf2\Demos\jw112.bf2demo
Need to be changed to:
demo.camerafile mods\bf2\Demos\jwanandtech112.bf2cam
demo.demofile mods\bf2\Demos\jwanandtech112.bf2demo
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
Thanks! I've corrected the file and uploaded the new version.--Jarred Walton
tayhimself - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
Hey Jared,This was a very well written article. You were thorough with the benchmarks almost to a fault. I liked your introductory and ending commentary. Your first article was just as good.
Props!
sxr7171 - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
Agreed. This was a quality job for sure and the questions he raises at the end are very pertinent. I'm sure he'll come up with the answers.ElFenix - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
i assume you used the stock heat sink/fan unit?JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Er, sorry I forgot to mention that. I used an XP-90 with a 3000 RPM 92mm fan (generic fan). I'll make a note of that, since that's important information. The followup looking at cooling options will use a retail HSF as well as the XP-90, an Asetek MicroChill, and an Asetek WaterChill. (Why Asetek? Because they asked me to review their two products.)Furen - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
How come the graphs arent zeroed? I suppose it'd be pretty much a bunch of overlapping straight lines if they were but having a graph that shows framerate from 63.5 to 65.0 is not much better.JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Yeah, the graphs could be a bit misleading unless you look at what the lines actually represent.The difference between the OCZ PC4800 and everything else looks huge in the http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/athlon...">Doom 3 graph @ 1600x1200 4xAA, but if you actually look at the lines, the difference is less than 1 frame per second.