System setup and notes
| System | AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 system | Intel Pentium Dual-Core system |
|---|---|---|
| Processors | AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 (2.1GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, AM2,
200MHz HTT, dual-core) |
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160 (1.8GHz, 1MiB L2 cache,
LGA775, 800MHz FSB, dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.67GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775, 1333MHz dual-core) |
| Motherboard | ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition | eVGA NF68 (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) G.SKILL F2-6400CL4D | |
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 @ various | |
| Graphics card(s) | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX reference board | |
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |
| Optical drive(s) | Sony DW-Q30A | |
| BIOS revision | 0501 (06/05/2007) | 691N0P30 (07/11/2007) |
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA Driver package 9.34 | nForce driver pack 9.53 |
| Graphics driver | Forceware 162.18 | |
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional w/SP2 | |
| PSU | FSP Epsilon 600W | |
| Monitor | Dell 2405FPW | |
Software
| Benchmarks | DivX 6.4 (existing DV avi source-file, home-theatre
profile, 1700Kbps, insane-quality video, 40Kbps, Stereo, 16KHz Audio) CINEBENCH R9.5 POV-ray 32-bit 3.7.0 beta 16a - internal benchmark mode Quake 4 v1.30 - OpenGL |
|---|
Notes
We've added in an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, currently retailing at around £110, to provide some comparison numbers from a processor costing twice as much. It should give you a decent indication if the full-flavour architecture is worth the extra outlay, especially when we look at overclocked performance of the budget processors.The subsystem isn't indicative of what you'd normally base these processors around, and that's deliberate. We wanted to ensure that the processors had room to breathe, so the choice of motherboards ensures maximum overclocking potential and the graphics card, a GeForce 8800 GTX, largely eliminates any GPU bottlenecks in our gaming test.
Staring the obvious, your overclocking mileage will vary and our article purports to be a simple guide on just how high the processors will go with some basic overclocking.
A truncated set of benchmarks have been run, and each benchmark can take advantage of at least two execution cores. On we go.
