Benchmarks & Overclocking I
During my bus speed tests, the AT7-MAX2 reached a staggering 210mhz using the corsair memory - with perfect stability. Trying to go above this speed resulted in graphical issues as the 2/5th divider for the AGP bus is just not enough at these sort of speeds.I decided against running any benchmarks with asynchronous memory configurations, as the gains are almost zero. With the memory at 200 MHz (DDR 400) and the FSB at 133 MHz there was in fact a drop in performance compared to the 133/166 asynchronous configuration - this i can only put down to reduced timings when running in this mode.
For the benchmarks i used a 200 Mhz FSB x 10 for a CPU speed of 2Ghz., along with the default 133 and newer 166 MHz FSB.
Test System Specification
Athlon XP 2000+, Multiplier unlocked, Vapochill™ cooled
in Project Black Ice.
Abit AT7-MAX2 Motherboard
Corsair PC3200 XMS3202 CL2.0 Platinum Edition
Creative Geforce 4 TI4600 @ 300/650
80GB Maxtor 740DX Hard drive
The following software was used:
Windows XP Professional
Nvidia Detonator 40.71 Drivers
3D Mark 2001SE
Sisoft Sandra 2002
Pifast v4.1
Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail
First up are the synthetic tests, starting with Sisoft Sandra.
3GB/s is one of the highest scores you will currently see on an AMD platform, and that figure is only reached thanks to the excellent FSB overclocking capabilities of this motherboard.
Again we see that the bus speed makes all the difference. With over a 1500 point lead between the 133 and 200 MHz bus's, people should really start to concentrate more on getting a good, highly overclockable motherboard with the memory to match, rather than the top CPU.
