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There wasn't much to commment on performance wise. XP3200+'s meagre 33MHz increase in clock speed compared to XP3000+ on the 166MHz front side bus meant all we were really looking for with nForce Ultra 400 on the ASUS was bus speed scaling in the applications where we'd see it most. And see it we did, Pifast and SETI saw a nice boost due to the official support for the new bus speed.
We didn't need graphs filled full of other systems on test to know where the performance would sit. For one thing, enthusiasts have been running Athlon XP's at 200MHz front side bus frequency and beyond for months now, this performance was no real surprise. The platform likes extra bandwidth and under the right circumstances you can see it working.
What's nicer to see is no shocks in performance or anomalies. Just a nice stable platform at peak performance with a new processor in sync with some nice memory.
I'll leave more in depth performance analysis for another time. It's fast and works properly, that's all that really matters as far as we're concerned today.
What about more exciting things like overclocking?
Overclocking
With a chipset rated to run at 200MHz at stock chipset voltage, you'd expect a nice bit of head room over a non Ultra 400 equipped board in terms of attainable bus frequencies. So with our test XP3200+ processor, dropping the multiplier to 10x and cranking up the bus speed was enough to test this theory out. With no chipset voltage adjustment available and common knowledge that bus speeds over around 220MHz aren't too common on older nForce2 boards without chipset voltage adjustment, anything over 220MHz would be worth seeing.
Overclocking performance
The System Studio 2 screenshot shows a bootup speed of 232MHz front side bus, fairly impressive for stock chipset voltage (the ASUS offers no adjustment).
3D operation wasn't too solid at 230MHz+ with random application failures when pushing the AGP bus. But 220MHz was perfect in terms of 3D operation, indeed 221MHz is the logged speed for a 3DMark project using this motherboard that will make an appearance in an upcoming article.
3DMark 2001SE @ 221MHz front side bus, stock chipset voltage
Mind the poor processor detection, that's the XP3200+ at 221 x 11 rock solid doing 3D on the A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe. Not too shabby overclocking wise.
So fairly exciting overclocking from a retail AMD board out of the box, it will most likely do a lot more in the hands of the eager enthusiast with a mind to increasing chipset voltage a little.
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