AOpen XC Cube EY855-II Pentium M SFF Review

Overclocking and Test Setup

Overclocking

In an odd sort of coincidence, the AOpen 855 motherboard was able to overclock the Pentium M 755 processor in the same fashion that we saw the DFI 855 motherboard do so.  By overclocking the FSB to 120 MHz and leaving the multiplier at its 20x setting, we were able to overclock to a 2408 MHz clock speed.  This is really an incredible overclock and makes a pretty drastic change in the complete system performance. 

Though I didn’t run the full gamut of tests on the AOpen system in its overclocked state, I did run enough stability tests to be confident in the results.  The performance numbers of the overclocked processor from our DFI review are included in our results here for your reference though. 

One rep in the motherboard industry reported to me that all the Pentium M samples they had seen were seeing a very similar 20% overclock potential.  Could we possibly be seeing some kind of “overclock lock” like we saw on the first batch of 925X chipsets from Intel? 

Test Setup

Though we obviously had to make some slight changes, the test beds were kept as exact as possible.  The Pentium M setup uses the same GPU, but in its AGP form and of course we have the other differences we already mentioned (such as DDR333, single channel, etc).  

Also in this case, with the AOpen system, we used the included 275 watt power supply (that was still able to power the X800 XT card flawlessly) and an IDE drive instead of SATA.

The benchmarks used were:

• SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP1
• AIDA32
• Cachemem
• Quake III: Arena
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• X2: The Threat
• 3D Mark 2001: SE v330
• 3DMark03
• Far Cry 1.1
• Doom 3
• PCMark04
• Business Winstone 2004
• Content Creation Winstone 2004
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• XMPEG / DivX Encoding
• WinRAR Compression
• CineBench 2003
• ScienceMark 2.0 Beta