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.

Overclocking on the nForce2 chipset has been a mixed bag according to most of the online media. Having seen the pre-production Asus A7N8X overclock to a 183 MHz bus speed, I knew that the chipset could handle it if properly implemented. However, the Leadtek board didn’t reach quite that far. The fastest I could reach on a stable level was a 178 MHz bus speed, for a total processor speed of 2.319 GHz over the 2.17 GHz of the Athlon XP 2700+ processor.

However, the Leadtek bios does include a lot of the options that are needed for a good overclocking experience. Front-side bus speeds are available up to 200 MHz in 1 MHz increments. They also allow for Vcore, Vmem and AGP voltage modification via the bios.

As I had just compared the nForce2 and KT400 chipsets, I didn’t feel it necessary to include one in this review. However, expect a full KT400 roundup very soon. Here I decided to look at how the Leadtek motherboard holds up against the first nForce2 motherboard we reviewed, the Asus A7N8X. (It should be noted that the Asus board was pre-production and we just today received an actual retail board from Asus).

Here are the complete system setups:

AMD Test System Setup
CPU 1 x 2.17 GHz AMD Athlon XP 2700+ Processor
Motherboards Leadtek K7NCR18D nForce2 Motherboard
Asus A7N8X nForce2 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 61.66
Operating System Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
Unreal Tournament 2K3
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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