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.
