Benchmark Results: Performance Gains
Performance Gains
While this article is more of a “How To” guide than a benchmark roundup, we still wanted to take a brief look at the performance achieved with our overclocking efforts. If you jumped straight to this page, be sure to note the chart on the preceding page detailing the overclocked settings used for testing.
In the Sandra CPU Arithmetic test, the scores increase according to core speed, but our Tweaked OC shows no gains resulting from the overclocked northbridge.
Overclocking the northbridge yields significant gains in memory bandwidth. The Tweaked PC leads the way, while the slightly lower NB speeds of the Max CPU OC cause it to trail the Stock Vcore OC.
Overclocking our Phenom II processor results in sizeable gains in the 3DMark Vantage CPU test. Additional memory bandwidth from increasing the northbridge speed raises the score even higher.
World in Conflict is quite CPU–intensive. Testing a low resolution without FSAA allows us to use very high details and still not be GPU-limited with the Radeon HD 4870. It’s no surprise that the minimum and average frames per second (FPS) both increase as we raise the CPU’s core speed. But notice the significantly better minimum FPS achieved by raising the northbridge speed. Memory controller performance and L3 cache speed are obviously important here, since tweaking the NB resulted in the same 6 FPS increase in minimum frame rates, as did the 1,100 MHz CPU overclock.
Overclocking the CPU significantly lowers the rendering time in 3ds Max 2009. Memory bandwidth didn’t come into play too much here, as further overclocking of the northbridge only provided an additional one-second reduction.
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What's the point of using a high-end mobo to overclock a mainstream/value cpu?
it's about how to squeeze all performance from an locked cpu .
this is a pro' article (head shot)
im a big amd fans, good stuff here, look forward to go back to amd
Good article! Too bad I killed my AMD CPU
great article, should be more like it,
and a few more gaming benches wouldnt hurt either guys!
speaking of headshots yes unreal tournament is probably the most important game to exemplify the value of overclocking and added framerates due to "headshots" and shtuff.
keep up the good work!
What's the point of using a high-end mobo to overclock a mainstream/value cpu?
Fair question; no one would likely do this IRL, but I think the point here was to see how high the locked CPU could go, so they used a premium mobo.
Paul, now that we know what this specific CPU can do, would it be useful to now put it on a more typical mainstream mobo and see what one might get from the same chip under more typical conditions?
The point would be to answer the following: if my budget just grew by $25, does it make more sense to buy a BE CPU or to get a more premium mobo?
What's the point of using a high-end mobo to overclock a mainstream/value cpu?
because value mobos vary in stability much more than premium mobos. this article was just about the CPU limit, not the mobo limit.
Tom's should do a shoot-out between an i7 920 and a 965BE that's had the multiplier taken down to 13x(2.6ghz), then both OCed to the max on the northbridge alone. I'm sure that would close the gap atleast somewhat, but I'm interested to see exactly how much. Maybe they could screw around with the HyperTransport multiplier as well, it might turn out that AMD has been shooting itself in the foot with the unlocked multiplier, when more performance would be had if they were forcing people to use the northbridge.
Good write up; but PLEASE do NOT recommend OCing via Windows. Most pro's here will tell you that same thing. BIOS > Windows for OCing.
Also how about putting this under WCing or DIce/LN2?
In the performance gains and the cpu tweaking page the graphs for world in conflict are switched.
Excellent article! Thank you for the work.
Very good article!. Ryun is right, those 2 graphs for World in Conflict are switched.
I was planning on OCing but this article has made me afraid to OC, it seems there are a lot more factors involved in this than i thought.
Really good article, in the pass I has a X2 6400+, and only can overclok 100MHz....now with the 955 I have 600MHz more that the stock frecuency....
nice article.
Amd has really improved overclockability with the dragons.
Who cares how high an AMD cpu hz will go when an i7 cpu with half the speed does more on every level.
wow great increases fom a triple core. 2.6 to 3.7 is great!
Shreder: You are a perfect example of a brainwashed sheep. Core i7 has been shown to have a definite advantage in:
Video Rendering(I don't care, maybe you do)
Synthetic Benchmarks(yawn)
Specific games that have been "optimized"(rigged) to perform better on an i7
Other than that, the advantage ranges from neglible to non-existant. Unfortunately, there are people like you who swallow every bit of the fanboy articles with cherry-picked benchmarks...