Anyone who simply wants to see the performance gains should feel free to skip to "Step Four: Evaluating Gains". Those interested in the raw numbers will want to look through the pages in between.
OCZ System Elite PC2-6400 OCZ2SE8002GK2x 1024 MB, CAS 5-5-5-15
Hard Drive
Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD150 GB, 10,000 RPM, 16 MB Cache, SATA 150
Networking
Marvell Yukon Gigabit PHY, enabled, offline
Graphics Card
Asus EAX1950PRO 256 MBGPU: ATI Radeon X1950PRO (581 MHz)RAM: 256 MB GDDR3 (1404 MHz)
Power Supply
OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI - 700W
System Software & Drivers
OS
Windows XP Professional 5.1.2600, Service Pack 2
DirectX Version
9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Platform Driver
Intel INF 8.1.0.1010
Graphics Driver
ATI Catalyst 6.12
Increased performance is what drives us to overclock, but these gains will only affect some parts of the system. Because overclocking is meant to boost CPU, RAM, and graphics performance, we concentrated on these three areas during testing.