System setup and overclocking
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Celeron 2000MHz S478 0.13u CPU (100FSB)
- AMD XP1600+ (133FSB) on ECS SiS735 K75SA motherboard
- AMD XP2700+ (166FSB) on Asus A7N8X nForce2 motherboard
- Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz (133FSB) on ABIT IT7-MAX i845E motherboard
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz (133FSB) on Gigabyte 8IHXP i850E RAMBUS motherboard
Components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB (324/620)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR266 and DDR356 for the P4 2.8GHz CPU
- ABIT IT7-MAX i845E motherboard (for Celeron 2GHz and P4 2.26B)
- ECS K75SA SiS735 motherboard
- WD 120GB 120JB hard drive.
- Samsung 181T TFT
- Alpha 8942 with 80mm Delta fan @ 7v
- Coolermaster S462 heatsink and fan
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- SiS 1.12 AGP drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, DivX 4.12 CODEC
- OcUK SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
A number of comparison processors on a number of platforms. Whilst the 2.8GHz P4 and XP2700+ aren't in direct competition with the Celeron 2GHz CPU, it's nice to see where they stack-up in comparison. The P4 2.26GHz is being run on its native 133FSB with memory running as per the i845E's specification at 133MHz. The XP1600 is also being run at its native 133FSB with strictest memory timings evoked (133MHz).
Overclocking
Here's where it gets interesting. The Celeron 2GHz, as has been mentioned before, is manufactured on a 0.13u process. We've seen just how good the yields from this process are with a number of regular Northwood P4s far exceeding their stated clockspeeds. Armed with an Alpha 8942 and 80mm Delta fan at 7v, I simply tried 133FSB (2660MHz) first. That came and went at default voltages. A bit of further experimenting lead to a rock-solid default voltage speed of 2940MHz. Yes, you've read that correctly. Increasing the load voltage to ~ 1.6v lead to a stable speed of 3150MHz, as shown below. Note the Stepping ID of 7. This denotes the very latest C1 stepping.
3200MHz was pretty stable for all tests, but I decided to go with 3150MHz for reviewing purposes. This is by no means an freak result. I've seen other users manage to get up to 3GHz using the standard cooler and default voltage (1.525v). To give the final speed as much help as possible, I ran the memory asynchronously at 210MHz (157.5FSB, 3/4 ratio on the IT7) with 2-6-2-3 timings. I'll be including this overclocked result in the benchmarks that follow, as I believe it to be typical rather than extraordinary.
