X-bit labs

April Confrontation: AMD and Intel Start the Price War (page 9)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/28/2007 | 05:18 PM ]

Overclocking

So far we have only discussed the CPU performance in nominal mode. However, there are a lot of overclocking fans out there, tweaking their CPUs to the top of their potential. Of course, our conclusions will hardly make those hardware enthusiasts happy, because all CPUs we tested today feature different overclocking potential. That is why we decided to include a chapter on overclocking into our today’s article: to answer some questions hardware enthusiasts might have.

We will overclock our testing participants to the typical frequencies that can be achieved with air cooling only. In order to make it all simpler to perceive and analyze we will assume that CPUs on the same cores overclock about the same. So, we will take one processor on Conroe core, one on Allendale core, one on Windsor core and Athlon 64 X2 on Brisbane core. We will not include any NetBurst based processors into this test session, because they are no longer of interest to advanced computer users for multiple reasons.

So, these are the CPUs that will participate in our overclocking tests:

• Conroe running at 3.5GHz frequency. To measure the performance of this configuration we took Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU. In our tests it worked in 8 x 438MHz mode. Note that Conroe based processors can very often overclock to higher frequencies, which we have already seen in our previous article.
• Allendale working at 3.2GHz. We took Core 2 Duo E4400 processor working in 10 x 320MHz mode.
• Windsor working at 3.2GHz. We used Athlon 64 X2 5600+ set as 14 x 229MHz. The memory frequency in this case was not 800MHz as with LGA775 CPUs, but 763MHz.
• Brisbane working at 3.0GHz frequency. For our tests we used AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ configured as 12.5 x 240MHz. The memory was running at 750MHz.

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