For testing, I had to obtain another AMD Thunderbird CPU, as mine is currently
on vacation with Stampie. (I hope it has a good time). I picked up a super cheap
AMD Thunderbird 650 CPU over at
CompGeeks before they
sold out. I was unable to get that particular CPU stable at anything above
900mhz, but that's just the "luck of the draw" there. (Remember boys and girls,
overclocking is an art, not a science :D). My testbed configuration was as
follows...
- AMD 650 Thunderbird SocketA CPU
- Thermosonic Thermoengine SocketA Heatsink w/80mm Delta38cfm fan (review
coming soon)
- Soyo K7VTA-Pro Mainboard
- 128meg Mushkin PC150 ESDRAM
- Quantum Fireball AS 7200RPM IDE HDD
- Aopen PDC 1640 DVD Drive
- Matrox G450 Millennium Dualhead (review coming soon)
- Creative Labs Soundblaster Live Value
- Windows Millennium OS
For brevity and focus, we're sticking with basic Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro
benchmarks/tests this time around, although I did "burn in" test the machine for
nearly 20 hours with a combination of HotCPU Lite, and letting some Quake3Arena
bots go at it non stop concurrently. I was able to achieve rock solid stability
with this CPU @ 6x140FSB (840mhz). I wish I would have had a CPU that could
nudge beyond 900-1000 @ 100FSB, because I feel the CPU in this instance was
limiting me from going beyond 140. It's not a bad CPU, but not the best 650
tbird I've tested.. At any rate, here are the results.
Sandra's CPU benchmark, a purely synthetic bench, shows the CPU performing as
it should at 840mhz. With my stick of PC150 Mushkin, I had no worries running
the memory at it's fastest possible timings, and with 4-way interleaving
enabled, we have a very respectable showing here in the memory bandwidth number.
We can certainly see that the Quantum Fireball AS 30GB ATA/100 HDD is
performing at it's potential here, with the Soyo's ATA/100 capable 686B
Southbridge. ~23,000 is an excellent single drive score here.
Next page: Conclusion
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