The 150 MHz Project, Part 2

Introduction

Part one of the 150 MHz Project included some general information about the FSB, including its history and all the important coherencies. Our benchmarks were run on an Asus P3V4X motherboard, which is using the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset.

I can imagine that many people are curious about the performance which could be achieved on a BX motherboard at 150 MHz FSB. As a matter of fact, BX is still the undisputed king of SDRAM performance. This second part will now deal with the 150 MHz results on an ABit BE6-II motherboard. It is one of the most famous overclocker boards, since it allows setting the FSB speed MHz by MHz and the core voltage in 0.05V increments.

Apology To The Asus V6600

In the first part of this article I also mentioned 160 MHz bus speed and pointed out that my AGP card (Asus V6600, 32 MByte GeForce) hadn't been able to run at > 80 MHz AGP clock, as the system didn't want to start up.

One of our readers, Hanni Ghattas, told me about his Asus V6600 running stable at 88 MHz. After some additional tests I have to correct myself, finally "blaming" the VIA chipset. Graphics card, RAM and my hard disk worked for some in the ABit board running at 160 MHz FSB, proving that those components are definitely able to boot up at 40 MHz PCI (hard disc), 106 MHz AGP (graphics card) and 160 MHz FSB and memory speed (main memory). Going into detail about this 160 MHz FSB issue would lead to far however.