Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. May 29th, 2003-
The venerable Kyle Bennett of [H]ardOCP
lays down law in the June issue of CPU Magazine. In his regular colum entitled [H]ard
Talk, this month Kyle talks about ABIT & Intel @ 1GHz.
 "By the time you read this, Canterwood boards will most likely be for sale on
e-shelves all over the USA. They will deliver to you the much-anticipated 800MHz
system bus for the Pentium 4. Canterwood will be known as the i875P, and the
i875P parts are "speed binned." This means that the i875P, which is Intel''''s
highend performance desktop part, is culled from the rest of the chipsets and checked to see if it is capable of running faster speeds than the others. This is exciting in itself, but of course, the first thing we wanted to do when we got our hands on one was overclock it.
ABIT, long known for its support of the black e-arts, delivered to me its 1C7-G mainboard. You most likely read the title of our little column and thought, "1GHz? Big deal. My mom has broken the 1GHz barrier." You may very well be correct, but has your mom broken the 1GHz mark on the frontside bus with a desktop PC that anyone can purchase? We opened up our ABIT box and installed our 3GHz Pentium 4 that uses the 800MHz, and off we went.
Because space is limited here, I''''ll cut to the chase. We installed one of our best heatsinks, the Thermalright SLK-900U, and a high CFM fan from Plycon.com and immediately went for the 250MHz FSB (x 4 for Intel''''s quad-pumped bus) and 250MHz DDR bus. Our CPU is unlocked, so we could set the multiplier at 12, giving us 12x250MHz, equaling our stock 3GHz clock. We could POST, but the system wouldn''''t boot WinXP. We worked with this for some time to no avail.
We then went to an unlocked 2.8GHz 533MHz bus CPU and used the same exact setup. To my chagrin, it POSTed and loaded WinXP at 1GHz FSB with the memory bus running at a synchronous 1GHz. Without a doubt, ABIT delivered to us the first true and stable "giga system" that we''''ve seen. (Later, we learned that our 3GHz-800 CPU was the bottleneck, as some quick Koolance watercooling allowed us to run our sought-after speeds.)
Of course, now that we had our CPUs running very stable at 1GHz FSB, we decided to run some benchmarks. What we found was pretty amazing news, as far as the world of CPUs go. We saw some nice jumps in scores moving from 3GHz533 to 3GHz-800, as we expected. What we saw going from 3GHz-800 to 3GHz-1,000 wasn''''t expected, which was basically nothing. Nada. Zilch. Increasing the Pentium 4''''s bus from 800MHz to 1GHz gave us nothing on the gaming front, and this is traditionally where large increases have been seen from FSB overclocking.
Now our experience on the business and content-creation applications benchmarks fared a bit differently. We did see increases from 533MHz to 800MHz, and we also saw some benefits from 800MHz to 1GHz FSB. Our theory is that our Winstone benchmarks run enough apps simultaneously to actually utilize the wider bus while our single-gaming benchmarks didn''''t.
We gamers have been seeking higher frontside buses for years now, knowing that combining that with CPU clock OCing delivers the best performance. It looks as though Intel may have very well claimed one of the current enthusiast Holy Grails. The Pentium 4s at 800MHz FSB may have no reason to push the bus beyond that point. Has Intel widened the FSB to the point that it has stripped what software can utilize it? After a couple of weeks of testing, our gaming benchmarks show exactly that.
 Now for the irony: FSB OCing is the only way to bump up the Intel CPU clock. So of course, we''''ll all be doing it anyway, and the ABIT IC7-G mainboard looks to be a very solid tool for making that happen. We''''ve suggested for months that folks wait for this chipset to upgrade, and there''''s no doubt it delivers. Just wait for those 800MHz FSB CPUs we talked about last month. We''''re hoping the 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz models that will be less expensive will of course be good OCers. With that you will be able to build a system that will truly fit the profile of "killer rig." For more details, check out http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDU5.
Read this and other great articles in the June issue of CPU magazine in stores
now.
Kyle Bennett is editor-in-chief of HardOCP.com (hardocp.com), one of ''''the
largest and most outspoken PC-enthusiast sites on the Web. HardOCP.com is geared
toward users with a passion for PCs and those who want to get cutting-edge
performance front their systems. Beware, though, Kyle is known for his strong
opinions and stating them in a no-nonsense manner while delivering some of the
most in-depth reviews and PC hardware news on the ''''Net. Talk with Kyle at
kyle@cpumag.com
ABIT Computer Corporation designs and sells a complete family of award-winning
mainboards and multimedia products that support industry-leading technology and
provide leading quality and performance for system integration of computer
components supporting a broad range of PC applications, such as e-commerce,
e-business, entertainment and education. Corporate headquarters are located in
Taiwan. For more information, visit the Company''''s web site at
http://www.abit.com.tw |
