Sapphire X800GTO Graphics Cards – Fireblade and Limited
Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up
CPU Overclocking
Even with the power of the AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Extreme Edition processors, we still find ourselves hitting a CPU limitation in a lot of our benchmarks. That is, the graphics cards have more performance to give but the processor is letting the team down.
By overclocking the processor we can see what kind of a performance increase we get. When something isn’t CPU limited the performance increase isn’t all that major but when we do have a CPU bottleneck, every MHz extra we can get can show us an excellent jump in performance.
The Athlon X2 3800+ was increased from 2GHz to 2.35GHz with a slight increase in the front side bus utilizing the stock X2 HSF.
Here we can see exactly the same picture as all our other benchmarks with the cards both performing extremely close to each other. As always Far Cry always benefits from the CPU overclocking and we can see a nice bump in performance for the lower resolution.
Page 10 of 12
