System Setup

Duron Overclocking

If you read our Duron 900 review, you may recall that we were able to break 1.1GHz with this little chip. Once again we were able to complete all gaming and stability tests, but for some strange reason the 1104MHz system wouldn't complete the full range of tests in Business Winstone 2001. At one point or another, it would simply stop running the scripted sequences, usually while performing tasks in Netscape.

Strangely enough, the system wouldn't lock up during this test - we could manipulate the system just fine. Instead, it would just sit there. Business Winstone 2001 must put additional stress on the processor. Therefore, instead of collecting numbers at 1104MHz, we settled for the next best alternative, 1080MHz (8.0x135).

Test System Setup

AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1000MHz (7.5x133)
Intel Pentium III 1000MHz (7.5x133)
AMD Duron 900 @ 1080MHz (8.0x135)
Intel Celeron 800 @ 1072MHz (8.0x134)
AMD Duron 900
AMD Duron 800
Intel Celeron 800

ABIT KT7A-RAID
YH Revision BIOS
ABIT BX133-RAID
XK Revision BIOS
ABIT BE6-II (for Pentium III system)
UJ Revision BIOS

Foxconn PK0451AEDAUFB heatsink w/ Sanyo Denki fan was used for all Duron systems
Taisol CEK733 used for Celeron systems

256MB Mushkin PC133 High-Quality CAS2 SDRAM

NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS 32MB
Driver version Detonator 6.50

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM
Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

Content Creation 2001

Business Winstone 2001

SYSmark 2001

3DMark2000 ver 1.1

3DMark 2001

Unreal Tournament - 640x480x32
Unreal Tournament - 800x600x32
Unreal Tournament - 1024x7680x32
Unreal Tournament - 1280x1024x32

Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x960 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1600x1200 Normal, High Quality

MDK2 - 640x480x32
MDK2 - 800x600x32
MDK2 - 1024x768x32
MDK2 - 1280x1024x32
MDK2 - 1600x1200x32

Serious Sam Retail - 640x480x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 800x600x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 1024x768x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 1280x1024x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 1600x1200x16 Normal

A desktop resolution of 800x600x16 was used for all tests.

Notes

We wanted to illustrate the performance difference between our value setups and a "performance" CPU. As you'll see in many of our tests, our "value" chips only come within a few percentage points of their siblings once overclocked. Since our 1GHz Pentium III is a Slot 1 CPU we ran tests with the BE6-II.

To save precious testing time, we simultanteously ran tests with our Celeron CPU on ABIT's BX133-RAID. Keep this in mind when looking over the office/content creation application performance, as the BE6-II utilizes HighPoint's ATA/66 controller while the BX133-RAID was running on an ATA/100 controller. We know this makes comparisons a little more difficult, but keep in mind our situation, each one of these setups takes roughly five hours to setup and fully test (as the hard drive is formatted and the OS reinstalled after each set of tests).