Benchmarks & Overclocking I
During my bus speed tests, the A7V8X reached a maximum bus speed of 205mhz using the corsair memory - with perfect stability. Trying to go above this speed resulted in hard lock ups and random errors. The multiplier settings worked properly with an unlocked processor.
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 slight drop in performance compared to the 133/166 asynchronous configuration - this i can only be 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 the newer 166 MHz FSB which the 2700+ and 2800+ processors use.
Test System Specification
Athlon XP 2000+, Multiplier unlocked, Vapochill™ cooled
in Project Black Ice.
Asus A7V8X Motherboard
Corsair PC3200 XMS3202 CL2.0 Platinum Edition
Albatron 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
Lets start with the traditional Sisoft Sandra bandwidth tests:
With sheer bus speeds and memory timings such as these you can expect to see a score as high as this. 3.1GB/s is pretty darn high for an AMD setup!
A review isn't complete without 3D Mark 2001 scores in it somewhere. This benchmark is extremely CPU and memory/bus bandwidth limited, as can be seen by the huge lead the 200MHz full timings setup has on the other default bus speeds.
