Overclocking, RAID and System Setup

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

The IDE RAID solution on the Soyo Dragon motherboard is provided by the Promise 20265R chip. This is the most commonly used chipset for IDE RAID on today’s motherboards, but there are a few different ways in which they work on those boards. My preferred way is for the RAID bios to allow the user to enable RAID on the IDE3 & 4 ports or to allow to be used merely as extra ATA/100 ports and having no RAID options on at all. Fortunately, the Soyo K7V Dragon uses this kind of Promise bios. Some other motherboard manufacturers have chosen to use the FastTrak bios’, which do NOT allow the user to simply add extra IDE devices to the IDE3 & IDE4 channels. There are several work around for this including setting up single drive RAID arrays or using a modified bios, none of which I can 100% guarantee. Potential Dragon purchasers will be glad to know their board is on the better side of this debate.

The Dragon offers every standard overclocking feature available on AMD motherboards. Using the system bios, you can edit the multiplier, front-side bus (up to 200 MHz) and the voltage (up to 1.85v). Using my standard overclocking tests, I was able to push the same 1.4 GHz Athlon used in previous tests to 1.65 GHz using air cooling (though very good air cooling). Take these results for what you will, as overclocking is a based very much on individual hardware components, etc.

Here is the system setup and the benchmarks I used:

Test System Setup
CPU AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz (133 MHz Bus)
Memory 2 x 128MB Corsair XMS2400 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE
Video Card Visiontek GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 12.90
Operating System Windows 98 SE

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
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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