Sneak Peek at 800MHz FSB Performance

The Test

For this type of review we needed a dual channel DDR motherboard that was capable of memory speeds up to dual DDR400 and at 533MHz FSB. The only motherboards that offer this kind of capability are ones based on the SiS 655 chipset. After testing the few SiS 655 motherboards currently available, the Gigabyte SINXP1394 (SiS 655) motherboard was the only 655 motherboard we were able to get working at 800MHz FSB. This setup was not stable 100% of the time, but was just good enough to run our benchmarks at 800MHz FSB.

Our 800MHz FSB tests were made possible by one of Intel's mobile Pentium 4 processors, the 1.7M processor. This CPU has a default multiplier of 12 (instead of 17) when installed in a desktop motherboard like the Gigabyte SINXP1394. In general, the lower the multiplier the higher the FSB overclock, and since 12 is by far the lowest Pentium 4 multiplier in existence, the 1.7M was the perfect CPU for our 800MHz FSB overclocking tests. So as previously mentioned, we were able to run the Gigabyte SINXP1394 at 800MHz FSB, which adds up to 12 X 200MHz for a 2.4GHz core clock. We had no trouble finding a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor that ran at 533MHz FSB to compare to our mobile processor.

We would like to thank Technonut from our forums for loaning us the 1.7M processor for this review.