Unlocking the Sapphire X800GTO² - 12 vs. 16 Pipe Adventure

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.

 

 

Like we always see 3DMark03 sees a nice performance jump at the lower resolution.

 

 

3DMark05 shows us a smaller increase at both resolutions since it is more reliant on the GPU.

 

 

Far Cry as always sees an excellent performance increase when we start to overclock the processor.