Overclocking and System Setup

Overclocking

When the Thoroughbred core debuted at 1.8GHz, enthusiasts had little luck overclocking the processor. Then, as AMD transitioned to a revised version of the core, overclocking took a positive turn. The Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ engineering samples proved stable at speeds of up to 2.3 and 2.4GHz.

Unfortunately, the nForce2 board didn’t want to cooperate with our overclocking efforts, so we employed the ASUS A7V8X KT400 board. Indeed, our own Athlon XP 2800+ sample would run at 2.4GHz (178MHz front side bus * 13.5x multiplier) using traditional air-cooling. That is to say, armed with nothing more than a Thermalright SLK-800, Vantec Tornado 80mm High Output and the voltage modifications on the A7V8X test bed, we ran a stable 2.4GHz and DDR400 memory speeds. The processor’s Vcore was adjusted to 1.8V and the DRAM voltage was increased to 2.85V in order to maintain stability in the demanding 3D Mark 2001 SE tests.

Test Bed

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz)
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz)

Preproduction ASUS A7N8X nForce2 Motherboard

512MB Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 Memory

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB
Detonator Driver 40.71

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA-100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh

All power saving options were turned off, as were the Automatic Update and System Restore services. Graphics options under the ‘Performance’ tab were all disabled for maximum performance.

Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.31 – ‘four’ demo
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter – Beyond3D Maximum quality script, 32-bit color, Grand Cathedral demo
Jedi Knight II ‘jk2ffa’ demo
Comanche 4
SiSoft Sandra 2002 Memory Benchmark test