Overclocked XP2500 seems slow

[jonob]

I have recently upgraded to an AMD XP2500 Barton on an A7N8X mobo and 2*256 PC3200 dimms, and a 9600XT graphics card.

First off, I tested my graphics with 3DMark 2001 and 2003 and in both cases came out slightly above some of the reviews that I have seen. So I am happy on that side!

Although I can now play games that I couldnt before (COD runs very nicely!), in general I I am not that impressed with the overall speed of the PC. I expected boot times to come down considerably, opening apps to improve, etc. There has been some improvement, but not THAT much.

So, I decided to get my hands dirty and started off with a moderate amount of overclocking. My multiplier is locked, to I set FSB to 180 instead of 166, and ram timings to 6,3,3,2T. I havent spent enough time to know if this has made much of a differene to speed, but PC is still rock solid and no problems with heat. I will go more as soon as my case fans arrive.

My question is this - what is the best way to benchmark my PC? I have used sisoft sandra, and it appears that my pc is running on par with sandra benchmarks for a XP 2400!!

Any other suggestions on how I can tell just how quickly my PC is running versus stock and overclocked 2500's?

Thanks for the help!

 

[TheRod]

First, did you upgrade your hard disk?

I have an Athlon XP 1800+ (o/c to 2200/2300+) and I use to get below average results in some benchmark, because my HDD is not "up-to-date". In some benchmarking tools, other components will influence overall results. Don't forget that if you run a firewall, ICQ, MSN, SETI or any application in "bcakground" this can affect benchmark results.

And what was the CPU you had before? Like I said, if you only changed CPU/RAM/MB, you will probably not boot or lad apps a lot faster. Booting and apps loading are very HDD dependant tasks.

--
Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

 

[jonob]

Well, I thought that may be answer, as I didnt upgrade my hard drive. Having said that, it is a 60gb @7200rpm with 2mb buffer.

In addition, I have also heard that Sandra benchmarks are not the best...so I am going to try Aquamark next.

 

[TheRod]

I just to add something...

I said that my HDD was not up-to-date, but when I load online games I play WarCraft 3 a lot). I'm usually the first one who is ready to play (I have fast load time). I think some HDD benchmark are not good at simulating real applications. They usually do sequential read, seq. write, random read, random write and random read/write.

But most of the time, we READ on the HDD, and if HDD is not fragmented much. HDD score should be great. I have the legendary IBM DTLA307030, when I bought it, it was THE fastest IDE drive. So I'm not surprised to get fast load time in game, but I'm always disapointed to see my HDD scores bad in benchmark... And I know it's not that bad.

Probably today's benchmark are more influenced by the amount of CACHE on the drive or their scoring don't reflect real world use...

--
Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

 

[phsstpok]

You have a slight disadvantage compared to an XP2400, pure clock speed. An XP2400+ runs at 15 x 133.33 Mhz, 2000 Mhz. Your XP2500+ runs at 11 x 166.66 Mhz, 1833 Mhz, at stock speeds and 11 x 180 Mhz, 1980 Mhz, overclocked. Naturally under some benchmarks your overclocked processor should perform on par with a stock XP2400+.

Your Barton has the advantage of bus speed and twice as much L2 cache over the XP2400+. You should see a huge difference in the Sandra memory benchmark.




<b>56K, slow and steady does not win the race on internet!</b>

 

[jonob]

Both Crucial

 

[jonob]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I ran aquamark a couple of times and got to around 32,000, which seems pretty good for a pc with my specs.

Guess its time for a new hard drive! Sata worth it?

 

[ytoledano]

First of all, people expect too much from overclocking their processors, and you only overclocked your CPU by 8%. If you want to see how far you can overclock before your fans arrive you can experiment with an open case, and if you point in a floor fan you can get ideal (noisy) case cooling and run benchmarks like that.
I also don't think that the HD has a lot to do with the benchmarks you tried, especialy not Sandra which when running the CPU bench only tests the CPU.
I found that running Prime95's benchmark and comparing it with the same computer OC/no OC works well <A HREF="http://www.mersenne.org" target="_new">http://www.mersenne.org</A>. Don't compare the result with P4s as Athlons don't have SSE2 which is used there.

Got a nice overclocked overvolted system to keep you warm at night? That's great. Guess I'll have to settle for a woman...

 

[jonob]

Well, its not really that I expected too much from the overclocking, its more that I expected to much from the stock!

Every other time I have upgraded my PC (every 18 months or so), and I reformatt and reinstall, its like WOW!! this is fast. Even though this time I upgraded from Athlon 1000 to Barton 2500XP, I dont really see that big a jump (other than the huge improvement in graphics, which went from a MX440 to 9600XT). So, my thinking is that the hard drive is constraining things....

Thanks for all the input.

 

[addiarmadar]

With Athlon chip you will not get a major gain in boot performance. I went from 1600+ to the barton 2500 oced to 3200 and my boot time didnt jump much but my gamming was very much improved.

AMD does not focus on app loads times but they are heavy into 3d processes. Thats how the AMD is.

Barton 2500+ @ 2200mhz (10x220 vcore @ 1.8)
Asus A7N8X Dlx 440 FSB
1gb Geil GD pc3500 Dual Channel (2-3-3-6)
Segata 80gb SATA 8.5ms seek
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro(420/720)