Overclocking and Test Setup
Overclocking
Toying with some quick overclocking on this motherboard I found it to be more than capable of cranking up the memory and processor bus even with the passive cooling system that Asus used. Since we were using a somewhat beta BIOS on a board that was still not retail revision, I’ll leave the majority of the overclocking information out for now, but I can say that by turning down the multiplier and cranking up the FSB I was able to easily reach the 275 MHz bus speed and take a 4000+ Athlon 64 processor well beyond the 2.4 GHz to 2.75 GHz with very basic cooling.
We’ll be looking at overclocking on the X16 chipset more in the near future.
Test Setup
Our test setup continues with our trend for motherboard and chipset reviews, using an Athlon 64 4000+ processor but a switch to the GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card. Since this is a motherboard review, we will focus on what features and performance the motherboard brings to the table in as close a comparison as possible to the competing products.
|
AMD Test System Setup | |
|
CPU |
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ |
|
Motherboards |
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe |
|
Power Supply |
Antec 480 watt |
|
Memory |
2x512MB Corsair Micro DDR500 |
|
Hard Drive |
250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA |
|
Sound Card |
Creative Labs Live! |
|
Video Card |
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (450/1.20) |
|
Video Drivers |
81.85 |
|
DirectX Version |
DX 9.0c |
|
Operating System |
Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
The benchmarks used were:
- SiSoft Sandra 2005
- Everest
- 3DMark05
- Far Cry 1.33
- Doom 3 v1.3
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- XMPEG / DivX Encoding
- WinRAR Compression
- World Bench 5
- PCMark04
- CineBench 2003
- SPECviewperf 8.0
- HD Tach – USB Performance
- NTTTCP – Network Performance
