Test Settings: Overclocking Comparison

DDR3 still hasn't worked its way down to mainstream price levels, and the main reason a buyer would pay relatively-high DDR3 prices is to achieve a similarly-high overclock without "hitting the wall" on memory speed. One could, of course, pay the astronomically high prices of DDR3-1800 or even faster overclock-validated extreme-enthusiast parts, but we wanted to see how far these less-expensive kits would go.

Newer platform components may be available, but the best overclocking motherboards use Intel P35 chipsets while the same company's Core 2 Duo processors withstand much greater bus speeds than its Core 2 Quads. We dug into the parts bin to retrieve the most overclockable parts regardless of age.

Our Intel Core 2 Duo sample is held in high esteem for reaching 520 MHz FSB at its default 8x multiplier and at least 540 MHz FSB using a 6x multiplier on top boards. Using the P35 chipset's highest memory ratio, this allows a 6x CPU multiplier to reach for data rates of 2160 MHz!

Of course, we'd need a motherboard that offered top memory stability, and the most appropriate part we've found for this type of testing is Gigabyte's GA-P35T-DQ6.

In order to reach a variety of memory speeds at a fixed 6x multiplier, we needed to alter the CPU speed for each test. The change in CPU speed has an overwhelming effect on a wide range of benchmarks, so we had to limit ourselves to memory bandwidth benchmarks in the overclocking portion of today's comparison.

We'll throw a more comprehensive set of benchmarks into our latency tests.