Overclocking and Benchmarks
The CPU bundle proved to be very stable at 1400Mhz, just as stated in the guarantee, I did obviously try for more speed, I didn't manage to break the magic 1500MHz barrier but I did get very close and got up to a stonking 1491MHz. The CPU ran fine at 1400MHz with the FOP32 fitted, but it was unstable under gaming stress at 1466MHz so I upgraded it by fitting the 7000RPM fan, off my own FOP38, and this got it stable at 1466MHz, 3DMark 2000 used to crash halfway through at 1466MHz until I put the faster fan on it, obviously the extra cooling helped it. The cooling problem won't be an issue with the Thermoengine heatsink that will be supplied with future bundles as it is a much better heatsink than the FOP32, and there is always the opportunity to upgrade it with the 7000rpm Delta fan for extra cooling potential (O: .Here's a few benchmarks taken at 1491MHz
Some more Sandra benchmarks taken at the highest speed that I achieved with the CPU.
I came pretty close to breaking the 1500MHz barrier, with the release of the 1.3GHz CPU from AMD being imminent it probably wont be long till OcUK are offering CPU's guaranteed at 1500MHz.
Gaming Benchmarks
Once I got the computer working and finished fiddling in the BIOS I tried running a few games, 3D games stress the CPU out a lot more than benchmarks programmmes such as Sandra, and as such I had to drop the speed back down a few notches to get it running 3DMark 2000 properly. At 1466Mhz I got it to run 3DMark 2000, with the Geforce 2 Ultra I was expecting some pretty high scores and I wasn't to be disappointed. At the default benchmark resolution of 1024*768 *16 bit I got a score 9330, this is the highest default score I've seen without any special tweaking, or overclocking, this is hardly surprising because this is by far the fastest CPU I've yet benchmarked, I ran 3DMark 2000 for all the possible resolutions, the results are shown below. Once I'd run the default benchmarks I tried out overclocking the card I upped the I/0 to 3.4 and turned the card up to 300Mhz Core 520MHz memory, the results from both benchmarks are shown below
| 640*480 | 800*600 | 1024*768 | 1280*1024 | 1600*1200 | |
| 1466Mhz Default | 11310 | 10267 | 9330 | 6986 | 5455 |
| 1466Mhz OC | 11373 | 10888 | 9983 | 7820 | 6156 |
To get higher scores the main thing the seems to help 3DMark 2000 is to increase the bus speed so I tried various settings, I managed to get 3DMark to run at a FSB speed of 143MHz, anything above that proved to be very unstable, with the FSB at 143Mhz I got the default 3DMark up quite a bit higher, see the picture below
This is a very impressive score the highest I've ever had, anything over 10,000 3DMarks is quite an achievement, and this bundle along with the Geforce 2 Ultra manage it very nicely indeed.
Quake 3 Benchmarks
I ran Quake 3 Demo001 in the various resolutions running the CPU at 1466Mhz, the Geforce 2 Ultra ran at default and overclocked settings, overclocked settings are denoted by the small "c" on the graph and on the table below. The FSB was running at 133MHz for the benchmarks.
Some tables showing the results in more detail
| Default | 640*800 | 800*600 | 1024*768 | 1280*1024 | 1600*1200 |
| fastest | 169.1 | 167.5 | 163.2 | 143.9 | 109.4 |
| HQ | 159.5 | 152.1 | 125.3 | 80.7 | 55.7 |
| EHQ | 155.2 | 146.9 | 116.7 | 74.4 | 51.6 |
The overclocked results showing a big leap over the default settings
| OC | 640*480c | 800*600c | 1024*768c | 1280*1024c | 1600*1200c |
| fastest | 169.4 | 168.4 | 164.8 | 152.6 | 125.3 |
| HQ | 159.9 | 155.4 | 137.6 | 93.9 | 65.6 |
| EHQ | 155.3 | 151.6 | 130.5 | 86.7 | 60.7 |
Well the Quake 3 results are fast, obviously the CPU helps but this is mainly a test for the graphics card, but rest assured the Geforce 2 Ultra works absolutely fine in this motherboard, unlike the previous DDR system I was using. As the Geforce 3 has just come out maybe the Ultra will drop to a more affordable level, only time will tell.
