Overclocking and RAID

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

For those of you that have been looking for a AMD 760 chipset motherboard that can give you the power of DDR memory with the ability to overclock, the Gigabyte 7DXR is your first glimpse at this.

Using the dipswitches on the motherboard you can edit the multiplier, front-side bus and Vcore voltage. The multiplier gives you options from 5.0x to 12.5x and the Vcore options are from 1.5v to 1.85v in 0.025v increments. The FSB options are bit lacking on the dipswithces, however. There are only 8 options which are 100.99, 106, 114, 120, 133, 140 and 150 MHz. However, if you plan on overclocking via the FSB, the Bios offers a great range of available options. Anywhere from 100 MHz to 250 MHz in single MHz increments. While I am sure that 250 MHz is a bit of overkill, I was able to reach 153 MHz FSB stable using some new Corsair PC2400 DDR Memory. Overall, the highest I was able to reach (in clock speed) with the Gigabyte 7DXR motherboard is 1.56 GHz with a 1.33 GHz processor and air-cooling. Not a bad showing at all!

Overclocking could have been improved had Gigabyte chosen to put the multiplier and voltage settings in the bios along with the bus speed settings. It’s hard to complain, however, when no other AMD 760 chipset board even offers what Gigabyte has.

Gigabyte is a supporter of the Promise controller that is nearly standard in today’s performance motherboard market. You can visit some of my previous reviews for an explanation of the RAID features included on the Promise controller which supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1, and you can see this thread in the forums for a detailed look at RAID in general.

Test System Setup
CPU AMD Thunderbird > 1.33 GHz (133 MHz Bus)
Memory 1 x 256MB Corsair PC2100 DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE
Video Card Visiontek GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 12.00
Operating System Windows 98 SE

You’ll notice in this review that I will be using some additional benchmarks that I haven’t before. I am preparing for a big AMD launch period, and I will be using lots of new benchmarks. Including them early helps both myself and you all get used to them and what they say about system performance. Test included here:

Quake III: Arena
Unreal Tournament
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark

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