Overclocking

Hmmm.... well I don't intentionally want to turn this blog into something too geeky, but seeing as I don't even know if anyone reads it already, I might as well post some info (for posterity more than anything!).

I've got an Athlon64 3200+ which normally runs at 2GHz, but lots of reports on the internet show that these processors (specifically the newer models made using a 90nm process [i.e. Winchester core]) are very good at overclocking as they run much cooler than the 130nm versions. So I thought, what the hell and had a play about with it last night.

I had previously been running it at 2.2GHz, by overlocking the base frequency from 200MHz to 220MHz, thereby running the CPU at 10x220MHz (2.2GHz) and the RAM at 220MHz (440MHz DDR), but the RAM wouldn't take much more as it is only rated to 200MHz. However after discovering that the A8N-SLI mobo allows you to adjsut the CPU:RAM ratio I was able to boost the CPU to 2.65GHz (!!!), with the RAM at 175MHz (350MHz DDR) using a 3:2 ratio. Not bad, but not perfect as Half-Life 2 occasionally crashed whilst running at these speeds, and clearly the memory performance is suffering due to the underclock on it. To get the RAM up to normal speed the CPU would have to be running at 3GHz which isn't gonna happen without some serious cooling power (and volt modding).
The best settings I eventually settled on was a 2.5GHz CPU , with the RAM at 208MHz on a 6:5 CPU:RAM ratio, and a 4xHTT bus ratio. Final results:

2.65GHz A64 CPU, 416MHz RAM@2.5-4-4-8
CPU: 12230 MIPS, (FPU)4178 MFLOPS, (SSE2)5401 MFLOPS
RAM: (Int) 4129 MB/s, (Float) 4083 MB/s

2.5GHz A64 CPU, 350MHz RAM@2-3-3-6
CPU: 11534 MIPS, (FPU)3939 MFLOPS, (SSE2)5099 MFLOPS
RAM: (Int) 4846 MB/s, (Float) 4852 MB/s

For comparison:

Pentium4 3.8GHz 570
CPU: 11115 MIPS, (FPU)4408 MFLOPS, (SSE2)7934 MFLOPS

So my 2.5GHz A64 is now faster than a Pentium4 3.8GHz CPU (!) in all but SSE2 calculations (which Intel did invent!). Nice. More results when they come....

BTW the X850XT PE gets:
Stock settings (540MHz Core/1180MHz RAM):
3DMark03: 13205

O/C'd (600MHz / 1180MHz RAM):
3DMark03: 13928