Overclocking

My initial foray into overclocking the AN7 didn't go too well but with a bit of tweaking we finally got off the starting line at 170FSB, up from the 166FSB. I then progressed in my usual 5's up to 175, 180, 185 and so on to 200 FSB but at 201 I had my first lockup booting into windows. Backing off to 200 provided a perfectly stable environment at 2.2gig or 3200+ settings.

Into the BIOS to lower the multiplier from its default 11 down to 10.5 x 200 for 2.1GHz, ready to raise the FSB once more. Whilst there I disabled the FSB and AGP Spread Spectrum settings to insure a good overclock. Then it was back into Windows and the OCGuru. 210 was our next hurdle; It was pretty much stable and everything was running fine but for some reason I decided to double check one last time, and sure enough PiFast refused to run more than halfway through the test. 3dMark01 also locked up during the Lobby scene. Back into the BIOS and lowered the multiplier once more for 10x210 and a 2.1GHz speed. Final results were 10x219FSB. Extra voltage, lower multipliers, watercooling, none of it availed me to break the 220FSB stable.

Test rig 1: Barton 2500+ (Supplied by ), Corsair TWINX512 PC3200, MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR, MSI GeForce FX5950 Ultra, 80gb WD HDD, W&CC Watercooling Kit, Windows XP SP1

Test rig 2: Barton 2500+ (Supplied by ), Corsair TWINX512 PC3200, ABIT AN7, MSI GeForce FX5950 Ultra, 80gb WD HDD, W&CC Watercooling Kit, Windows XP SP1

Test software will be:

UT2003
Splinter Cell
Q3
CoD




Though most benchmarks should be self explanatory, VirtualDub and TMPGEnc may raise a few eyebrows. We've elected to use these apps as real-world tests, and wrote this small article to explain our testing methodology.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

The AN7 outperforms our comparison the K7N2 easily enough here, although in real world terms the difference is negligible. Upping the FSB to 200 provides the obvious and nice increase you would get with a 3200+ processor.

CPU Multimedia

Both boards perform virtually identical here which considering they are same chipset is not too surprising.

Memory Benchmark

This graph shows the same thing we saw with the NF7-S in comparison with the K7N2, that MSI out performs ABIT in the memory department. The effect this will have in real world terms is minimal as the Multimedia test above has shown. Once overclocked the AN7 puts in some nice numbers.

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