The 150 MHz Project, Part 1

The Test System

We decided to overclock by 10-15% again, since this seems to be a slew which most components should tolerate. Our basic system is now running at 133 MHz FSB by default. Again there is the question whether to use a system based on i820 and RDRAM, or a platform using VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset. In my eyes Rambus systems are not particularly suited for overclocking due to the memory issue. i820 can only be faster using PC800 RDRAM, whose actual pricing is as high as low end computers. People who want to spend more money on their memory than others would spend for a CPU usually don't need to overclock their system.

VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset is a platform which is affordable and which should be quite widespread very soon.

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Test System
CPU Intel Pentium III
Motherboard Asus P3V4X, Rev. 1.02BIOS 1003VIA 4in1 Drivers 4.17
RAM 128 MB PC133 SDRAM, 7ns (Crucial/Micron) CL2
Hard Disk Seagate Barracuda ATA ST320430A,20 GBytes, 7200 rpm
Graphics Card Asus V6600, nVIDIA GeForce 25632 MByte SDRAMnVIDIA Drivers 5.08 for Windows 98 and Ver. 3.68 for Windows NT
Operating Systems Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 AWindows NT 4.0 SP6a
Benchmarks and Setup
Office Applications Benchmark BAPCo SYSmark2000
OpenGL Game Benchmark Quake III ArenaRetail Versioncommand line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Graphics detail set to 'Normal', 640x480x16Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1'
Direct3D Game Benchmark ExpendableDownloadable Demo Versioncommand line = -timedemo640x480x16
Screen Resolutions 1024x768x85, 16 Bit
DirectX Version 7.0
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.