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Building a Better Budget PC

 by Jarred Walton on July 10, 2006 8:55 AM EST
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Overclocking Results

It is important to state that in all cases we are using the stock retail heatsinks (except with the simulated X2 3800+, which used a Zalman CNPS9500). Again, adding a nice aftermarket cooling solution might improve overclocking results a bit, but for the extra $30-$50 you could simply upgrade to a faster processor instead. Here are the overclocking results we achieved as well as the settings that were used. We tried for 100 MHz increments on the CPU overclock, so if we could get a system running at 2.5 GHz but not 2.6 GHz, we stopped at 2.5 GHz. With additional time and effort, we could improve the final results and increase performance a few percent, but searching for the elusive last 3%-5% is beyond the scope of this article. (CPU speeds are approximate to within 10 MHz -- slight differences between the specified bus speed and the actual bus speed can affect clock speed slightly.)

AMD Sempron 754 System
Stock Setting Overclocked Setting (39%)
HyperTransport Speed 200 MHz 278 MHz
HyperTransport Multiplier 5X 3X
CPU Multiplier 9X 9X
CPU Speed 1800 MHz 2500 MHz
Memory Ratio DDR-400 DDR-400
Actual Memory Speed DDR-400 DDR-556
Memory Timings 2-3-2-10-2T 2.5-3-3-10-2T
CPU Voltage 1.350 V 1.550 V
Memory Voltage 2.800 V 2.800 V


AMD Sempron AM2 System
Stock Setting Overclocked Setting (50%)
HyperTransport Speed 200 MHz 300 MHz
(278 MHz Biostar)
HyperTransport Multiplier 5X 4X
CPU Multiplier 9X 9X
CPU Speed 1800 MHz 2700 MHz
(2500 MHz Biostar)
Memory Ratio DDR2-800 DDR2-533
Actual Memory Speed DDR2-720 DDR2-772
(DDR2-714 Biostar)
Memory Timings 4-4-4-12-2T 4-4-4-12-2T
CPU Voltage 1.350 V 1.550 V
Memory Voltage 2.100 V 2.100 V


Intel Budget System
Stock Setting Overclocked Setting (35%)
Front Side Bus Speed 533 MHz 720 MHz
CPU Multiplier 20X 20X
CPU Speed 2667 MHz 3600 MHz
Memory Ratio DDR2-667 (2:5) DDR2-720 (1:2)
Actual Memory Speed DDR2-667 DDR2-720
Memory Timings 4-4-4-12-2T 4-4-4-12-1T
CPU Voltage 1.125 V 1.400 V
Memory Voltage 2.100 V 2.100 V


Simulated AMD X2 3800+ AM2 System
Stock Setting Overclocked Setting (30%)
HyperTransport Speed 200 MHz 260 MHz
HyperTransport Multiplier 5X 5X
CPU Multiplier 10X 10X
CPU Speed 1800 MHz 2600 MHz
Memory Ratio DDR2-800 DDR2-533
Actual Memory Speed DDR2-720 DDR2-650
Memory Timings 4-4-4-12-2T 4-4-4-12-1T
CPU Voltage 1.350 V 1.500 V
Memory Voltage 2.100 V 2.100 V


Starting with the percent overclocks achieved, the two Sempron offerings tie for first place with a 39% overclock when using the budget motherboards (we were able to get a 50% overclock with the Sempron AM2 using the Gigabyte nForce 590 SLI motherboard), while the Pentium D 805 falls behind with "only" a 35% overclock. However, getting a 35% overclock out of a budget dual core platform is in some ways more impressive than a 40% overclock of a single core CPU. If you happen to run applications that take advantage of multiple processors, you can probably already guess that the Pentium D 805 is going to easily beat anything that the two Sempron platforms can put up in SMP-aware benchmarks. It's also important to note that the Pentium D would actually load Windows at 3.8 GHz and POST at up to 4.0 GHz. Better cooling (and a better power supply) would have almost certainly allowed a higher overclock, but as mentioned for the price you may as well start with a better CPU.

The Sempron systems were far less likely to POST at higher overclocks, at least with the budget motherboards. The Biostar TForce AM2 motherboard in particular hit a brick wall with a HyperTransport bus speed of 280 MHz; below that it would POST, but above that it required the use of the CMOS clear jumper to get the motherboard back online. Given our experience with other AM2 motherboards, we would venture to guess that a BIOS update could improve the Biostar motherboard. However, we are currently using the latest Biostar TForce 550 BIOS, and the motherboard has been available for about six weeks now. Hopefully, Biostar will release an improved BIOS for the motherboard that addresses performance and overclocking, but we don't make purchase recommendations based on hope.

In terms of ease of overclocking, the Biostar TForce4U-775 was actually the most difficult system to deal with. The difficulty wasn't so much in actual capability, but more in terms of understanding the BIOS options. We ended up using "expert" mode for the bus and memory settings, then we specified a front side bus value of 720 MHz and a memory speed of 540-720 MHz dependent on which memory was used. CPU-Z doesn't always report the correct memory speed on the motherboard, which caused some confusion on our part. For example, the 720 FSB speed and 720 MHz memory speed shows up in CPU-Z as a 1:1 memory ratio and a 360 MHz memory speed. However, benchmarks confirm that the memory is indeed running at a 1:2 ratio.

So now we've set the stage with the processors used and the overclocks achieved. Let's find out how things shake down in the actual benchmarks. We have run most of our typical motherboard benchmarks, and all benchmarking was conducted at 1280x1024 resolution with settings appropriate for a midrange graphics card, with the exception of 3DMark03/05 which were run at the default 1024x768.

System Configurations General Performance
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