PC Partner ATI Xpress 200 Review - Overclocking the Motherboard and Benchmarking
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Overclocking on the Radeon Xpress 200
This board is not intended for extensive overclocking, but it has a few options for increasing system performance. I had intended to take the system as high as it could go using the maximum settings available in bios. The motherboard gives me the ability to take the FSB all the way up to 255Mhz, and I cynically figured it would fall short and barely reach the 220Mhz range.
To my surprise, as I increased the FSB and booted the system, I quickly passed the 220Mhz mark. As it kept booting, I ran Super Pi to 32M integers, then ran 3dmark 03 to check system stability while gaming. It ran all the way up to 251Mhz before it failed in 3d Mark 03!
Test Bed
- Pentium 4 520 2.8Ghz CPU, (14x200FSB, 14x250FSB)
- 1x512MB Patriot PC4200 Memory
- PC Partner RC410MS7-A82C Motherboard
- Antec Smart Power 500W
- Samsung 80GB SATA HDD
For this review, I’m going to run the standard set of benchmarks. One is SuperPi, a simple benchmark which shows how long it takes to the computer to calculate the value of Pi (3.14…) up to 1 million integers. Lower times are best. I’m going to use 3D Mark 2001 and 2003, which tests 3D gaming performance results are as an average for different game scenarios. Good components in the system yield higher scores. I intended to run SiSoftware Sanda 2005, but for some reason it simply wont run on my system.
Results
I am definitely impressed with the performance of the board. Despite the limitations that are a part of its compact design, it still performs beyond what I thought the system was going to be able to.
In 3D Mark, the system offers very little increase in performance with the system overclocked. Where the game simulator gets extremely CPU intensive, the system is almost choppy and performance drops noticeably, but it looks great.
Like I said before, lower is better. One million integers is reduced by almost a full 10 seconds. This shows a significant increase in processor speed with a little bit of overclocking. The lack of dual channel is a performance hit, though my other testbeds run stock 1M in a little over 46 seconds.
Next: Conclusion >>
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