X-bit labs

Choosing a Budget CPU: 24 Value Processors from Intel and AMD in Our Lab (page 12)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/15/2004 | 12:44 PM ]

So let’s get acquainted with participants of our second testing session:

• A member of the Celeron family: Intel Celeron 2.2GHz CPU overclocked to 3.08GHz by increasing the FSB clock rate to 140MHz. We didn’t include an overclocked Celeron on the Willamette-128 core because a 2.1GHz Celeron would be clearly out of place among the others;
• Intel Pentium 4 1.8A overclocked to 3.24GHz by increasing the FSB to 180MHz;
• A member of the Athlon XP family on the Thoroughbred core (Thorton): Athlon XP 2000+ CPU overclocked to 2.19GHz by increasing the FSB clock rate to 175MHz;
• A member of the Athlon XP family on the BArton core: Athlon XP 2500+ CPU overclocked to 2.2GHz by increasing the FSB clock rate to 200MHz.

Note that I don’t set myself a goal of impressing you with any overclocking records. My goal was to check out which processor family was better at overclocking. In other words, what processor you should buy if you are going to use it at a non-regular frequency. Thus, I didn’t use any special cooling methods and only increased the Vcore by 10-15% above the nominal value.

The testbeds remained the same as well as the set of benchmarks. The results follow.

Overclocking Performance

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