Q3Test 1.08 Fastest

P3-600

Celeron 300A

Notes

Ready for this? 1024x768 is now free in fastest! As promised, we now have timedemo scores on the Celeron 300A. As you can see, the speed of the CPU still has a huge impact on framerate.

On a whim we decided to try overclocking the AGP bus to see if we could squeeze out any more performance. We increased the AGP bus from 66MHz to 100MHz by changing the AGP clock ratio from 2/3 to 1/1. Most current generation video cards can't handle a 100MHz AGP bus, but the GeForce took it in stride. The increase in AGP bus speed didn't yield any improvements in framerate, so we decided to try upping the FSB.

It was time to break out our favorite 128MB stick of 6ns Hitachi SDRAM. We swapped out the RAM, and then changed the multiplier and FSB on our Intel Engineering sample P3-600 to 4 x 150MHz (engineering samples aren't clock locked). After running a few demos we found that a 50% increase in FSB gave us about a 10% increase in framerate. This was surprising because back in the day when we first tested different FSB speeds when the Pentium II first came out, we found that higher bus speeds gave virtually no framerate increases in Quake2. Back in the Socket7 days when the L2 cache was on the motherboard, increasing the FSB speed would dramatically improve performance becasue it directly affected the cache. The Pentium II moved the cache onto the processor PCB and the cache ran at half the processor speed. The cache didn't depend on the FSB speed anymore; changes in the FSB speed no longer affected performance, or so we thought. Memory bandwidth is important on and off the video card.