Benchmarks - Continued

The final setting that can be adjusted is the Memory and FSB ratio, which governs how quickly the two independent streams of data run; one from the memory clock, and the other from the Front Side Bus (FSB = the rest of the PC system, bar the CPU). This influences how much data can flow into the CPU instruction queue; the same bus carries the signals from the CPU back to the various components. To visualize this, I'll try explaining it simply as a two-way highway whereby because we increased the FSB, the highways lanes have been doubled.

Imagine the lanes packed with cars, lined up to enter into limited parking bays. The cars coming from the Memory side of town can park five cars for every three cars coming from the FSB side of town. Since there is a finite number of parking bays, then the same ratio is applied to the cars that are leaving. While this image might seem chaotic, it is simple and orderly for the CPU as it goes about its business of crunching "0" and "1"s. The other two ratios are 8:5, or 4:3.

Overclocking the VGA to 460MHz, the system bus to 240MHz, and the Memory/FSB ratio to 5:3 we managed to get a PCMark05 score of 6477.

The last test was pedal to the floor with all the OC settings maxed out (VGA to 450MHz, FSB to 260, and Memory/FSB ratio to 5:3). Amazingly the notebook took it well without any problems at all. There were no glitches and despite being a little hotter than usual, it was just another day cranking out bits and bytes for this trusty TurboBook.

Our last test was to see if the Turbo button could in any way emulate our manual OC findings. Below you can see our result. I have to say I'm quite impressed with it, and it certainly lives up to the 20% increase in clock speed as touted on the MSI website.

Finally we have tabulated the results so you can see performance gains more clearly. With Futuremark's recent release of PCMark Vantage, we ran through some quick benchmarks and included them in the table. It must be noted that we tried MobileMark 07 but it was not able to run through completely to give us a benchmark result.