Overclocking 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 bios on A7N8X board offered a lot of features and options for overclocking. There were adjustments for FSB and memory speeds. Oddly, you could increase the memory speed asynchronously from the front side bus only by percentages. While you could get the same results, the math was just a little out of place for figuring out your actual memory speed compared to the FSB. Voltage settings were available for memory and processor, but multiplier settings weren’t really found anywhere.

Having used the Asus A7N8X motherboard in my Athlon XP 2700+ review, the overclocking results were of course the same. I was able to push the 2.17 GHz 2700+ processor up to about 183 MHz FSB (synchronous with the memory speeds) for a total running speed of 2.383 GHz. All of this was using the highest speed memory settings in the bios, also.

The system setup for the benchmarking was, again, identical to that of the recently published Athlon XP 2700+ review. This time, I used the Epox 8K3A+ motherboard to compare against the nForce2 motherboard. While I would have really liked to include other boards in this comparison using the 2700+ CPU, the thermal diode on the processor (pre-production) was not functioning correctly and thus we had varying success in even POST-ing boards that tested for the diode’s temperature before power up of the system. Such is my luck. I have assurances from AMD that I will soon have a full-working and production sample processor in order to run more tests between the Asus nForce2 board and other KT333 and KT400 motherboards.

AMD Test System Setup
CPU 1 x 2.17 GHz AMD Athlon XP 2700+ Processor
Motherboards Asus A7N8X nForce2 Motherboard
Epox 8K3A+ KT333 Motherboard
Memory 2 x 256MB Corsair Micro XMS3200 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 80 GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE
Video Card ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Video Drivers Retail
Operating System Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
SPECviewperf 7
Cachemem
ScienceMark

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