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Overclocking
If you've read our Asus A7V266E review last week, you already know how we did. For the ones who haven't got the chance to look at it, we managed a 143FSB overclock, which is not bad for a locked CPU. I have been having some trouble with our DDR Ram, so I'm pretty sure with a little more tweaking, we can hit a little higher. Unless you unlock the CPU though, don't expect miracles with the 2000+. A 12.5X multiplier may be too much to handle.
Unlocking a processor will likely yield better results. Something I've been thinking about though..., unless you plan to increase the multiplier, why would anyone bother unlocking? I know a lot of people who lower the multiplier to acheive a higher FSB overclock, but if that's the case, why not just buy a slower CPU which already has a lower multiplier? Anyhow, I'm still debating this topic, and I'll address it on a later date. Anyhow, just thinking out loud...
Update: Since posting the review last night, I went ahead and got myself an unlocking kit. These usually sell for about 15$, and you can buy one at . We lowered the multiplier to 11, and needed to up the vCore to 1.85. I wasn't able to run my ram settings at CAS2, but needed to drop down to CAS2.5.
Test Setup
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7V266-E
512MB PC2100 Kingston DDR
2 x 60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Harddrives, Promise RAID
Visiontek XTasy Ti4600
To round things out...
Windows XP Professional
Via 4-in-1 v4.37(a), w/AGP 4.10
nVidia Detonator 23.11
We're going to start off with the actual scores of the XP 2000+. Most of the images are clickable if you want to verify the numbers. We'll be testing it directly against the XP 1800+ on the next page, just to see if the extra 133MHz (1.53 - 1.67) makes a big difference. The rest of the hardware will be identical.
Benchmarks
SiSoft Sandra is an industry standard benchmarking tool. It's synthetic benchmarks though, and we don't really use it as the sole test of our PCs. It is handy in whipping up quick numbers for comparison purposes though.
  
PC Mark 2002 is a new benchmarking tool by MadOnion, that is available online, to benchmark your PC in a typical production environment.
3D Mark 2001SE is the update to the popular 2001 version. It's a Direct X 8 stress tool, and when used with the lowest setting, it provides a good gauge of your PC subsystem's ability to process 3D graphics. Higher resolutions will be more video card dependent. Before you get too excited, the benchmark was at 640x480, at 16bit colour.
Quake 3: Arena is our choice for a real-world OpenGL gaming test. It does test the video card more (as does 3D Mark), but lower quality settings should allow the CPU and motherboard to run as fast as it can.
Previous Page - Architecture
Next Page - More Testing
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