X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 10)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/27/2006 | 02:34 PM ]

Overclocking

We took an AMD Athlon X2 4800+ processor to check the overclocking potential of the mainboard and the new chipset. This sample had been stable at a clock rate of 2.7GHz on an nForce4 SLI platform (at a clock-generator frequency of 225MHz).

With our sample of A8R32-MVP Deluxe we passed the Super PI test at 2765MHz CPU clock rate (set as 230MHz x 12) by increasing the core voltage by 0.1V and using the version 0310 BIOS. We couldn’t get any further. The system was not stable at a higher clock-generator frequency and would hang up even when we increased the CPU voltage by 0.2V above the default value. Our increasing the voltage on the HyperTransport and PCI Express buses was fruitless, too.

So, we suspect we reached the overclockability peak of our sample of Athlon 64 X2. The ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe has a certain advantage over the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe when it comes to overclocking, but it is indeed very small. The mainboard will perhaps do better with some other processor.

And then we tried to overclock the processor at a reduced frequency multiplier. We got an impressive result: 323MHz clock-generator frequency at 2T Command Rate. And finally we made an attempt to overclock the PCI Express bus. We succeeded to raise its frequency to 130MHz at 1.3V voltage, i.e. by 30%. This is a little lower than the 40% frequency growth promised by ATI Technologies, yet we cannot but agree that the CrossFire Xpress 3200 really does well at overclocking.