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 2.5GHz with a slight increase in the front side bus utilizing the stock X2 heatsink fan.

3DMark03 sees very little gains when it comes to overclocking the processor. We get a small bump but nothing much considering we have a 25% overclock.

3DMark05 sees us gain a bit at the lower resolution but not so much at the higher resolution.

Far Cry loves every MHz it can get and when we increase the processor to 2.5GHz we get some blistering fast results.