Test
Setups
ABIT
AN7 (UDP 4.27s), Athlon
XP 2500 (provided by Overclock),
MSI
GeForce FX5950 Ultra 256MB (Forceware Drivers 61.77), 80GB
WD 8MB Cache HD, Windows XP SP2
ABIT
IC7 Max3, Pentium 4 2.4C, MSI
GeForce FX5950 Ultra 256MB, 80GB WD 8MB HD, Windows XP SP2
Overclocking
Overclocking
was performed on two different systems, an AMD Athlon XP system
and an Intel P4 2.4C.
Starting
with the AMD system, the first thing I did was try to remove the
bottleneck as much as possible, which entailed a search of ABIT's
forums for a new BIOS. I know many enthusiasts will be aware of
the TicTac BIOS, of which I am running a derivative by EnduraCell
based on the v16 BIOS for the AN7. The particular BIOS is the
CPC2T version. Anyway, I've previously never gotten higher than
219 FSB, so if you too have had this trouble, give one of the
TicTac BIOS images a spin (though be aware you do so at your own
risk).
The
other thing I did was to lower the Multiplier down to the lowest
bootable that I could attain which was 9.5. These efforts, plus
the water-cooling from WACC, gave me high hopes and I wasn't disappointed.
I was able to push the system to a stable 240 FSB, which
whilst only at 2.28GHz is still quite high for a non Mobile Athlon.
Of
course the ram here wouldn't have been the limiting factor since
it is rated for 250MHz, so switching over to the ABIT IC7 P4 platform
allowed us to find the limits of the ram which pushed all the
way up to 274MHz. I'd like to be able to say that the ram
might have had more in it, but I was able to boot into Windows
and perform non intensive tasks at 276MHz, with 274MHz becoming
stable. However, we shouldn't detract from the fact that 274MHz
from ram that is rated at 250MHz is a very impressive overclock
in its own right.
In
both cases I've had to bump up the voltage from a default 2.7v
to 2.9v to maintain stability and in both cases the ram handled
the extra voltage increase without issue. I would like to have
been able to have tested this ram at lower speeds and lower latencies,
but the AN7 can be real picky with its memory, and wouldn't let
me POST with the Ultra PC4000 at anything other than 3-4-4-8.
This is in line with other PC4000 I've tried such as the Corsair
TWINX kits.
Test
software will be
SiSoft
Sandra 2004
PiFast
CDex 1.51
TMPGEnc
Unreal Tournament 2004
Quake 3: Arena
All
of the test software applications were run 3 times and the results
averaged between the 3. Unfortunately, the 2.4C wasn't mine, and
due to time constraints I wasn't able to finish the benchmarking
on the Intel platform. I've presented what results I was able
to get, along with comparisons with the Corsair PC4000, and I
hope to be able to come back and finish the results at a later
date.
SiSoft
Sandra
Although
a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if
you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the
memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.
|
|
Ultra
PC4000
|
Corsair
TwinX 1024 PC4000
|
|
|
Float
|
Int
|
Float
|
Int
|
|
AN7
@ 9.5x240
|
2996
|
3280
|
3085
|
3320
|
|
IC7
Max3 @ 250
|
5610
|
5690
|
5634
|
5630
|
MB/s,
Higher is better
SiSoft
Sandra's results show the Ultra to be on par with the Corsair
PC4000 TwinX in the bandwidth test. This isn't to much of a
surprise as with both being PC4000 and both being tested at
equal speeds the results should be similar. If they were different,
that is when we would have something to talk about.
PiFast
A
good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version
4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits
of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note
that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
|
|
Ultra
PC4000
|
Corsair
TwinX 1024 PC4000
|
|
AN7
@ 9.5x240
|
53.31
|
53.32
|
|
IC7
Max3 @ 250
|
45.12
|
45.03
|
Time
is Seconds, Lower is better
Again
the Ultra shows that it is more than capable of keeping up with
the big boys with very similar times to the Corsair.
CDEX
I
took a CD (Bad Company - 10 from 9), and ripped it to one long
414MB .wav file. I then turned around and encoded that wave
file to a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3. I am sure there is a negligible
HD performance influence in this test but with the amount of
memory we are testing, it shouldn't be more than a fraction
of a second.
|
|
Ultra
PC4000
|
Corsair
TwinX 1024 PC4000
|
|
AN7
@ 9.5x240
|
2:01
|
2:01
|
|
IC7
Max3 @ 250
|
1:26
|
1:26
|
Time
in Minutes, Lower is better
This
kind of test is very CPU dependent, however the memory speed
and quantity do serve to speed up the process quite a bit. Once
again their is little difference between the Ultra and Corsair.
TMPGEnc
MPEG Encoding
Video
editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the TWINX using
TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode an Animatrix short of 150MB to a DVD
quality mpg of 5000Kbps. Note that lower scores are better.
|
|
Ultra
PC4000
|
Corsair
TwinX 1024 PC4000
|
|
AN7
@ 9.5x240
|
14:31
|
14:32
|
Time
in Minutes, Lower is better
In
this test the Corsair loses out to the Ultra although the difference
is negligible and well within the accepted margin for error.
NEXT
