A rchive Date
[ 12-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ AMD ]
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[http://www6.tomshardware.com/
Athlon delivered a perfectly stable performance
It was a very pleasant surprise to find out that our Athlons ran at up to 750 MHz without any additional means of cooling. This shows that the Kryotech-system could possibly run even faster. Athlon ran as stable as a rock, and when I say stable, I really mean it! I am not talking of crazy overclocking and calling a system stable that needs to be rebooted twice daily. Athlon performed really stable and any software I threw against it ran without any crashes for days. The stability-issue brings me to another thing. Many of you wrote me concerned emails, enquiring if Athlon-platforms might have the same compatibility-problems as the Super7-platforms for K6, K6-2 and K6-3.
We have four different Athlon-motherboards here in the lab and each platform ran perfectly with any soft and hardware we used. This includes all known graphics cards from our ongoing "33 3D-card" mammoth-test, even the power-hungry 3Dfx Voodoo3 3500, which made several BX-boards cough really hard. This V3-3500 issue is actually not at all 3Dfx's fault, it's due to weak power supplies on several, even well known, BX-boards. Brent is currently working on two articles that follow up on the above said.
Pentium III was cranked up to 650 MHz as well ...
Talking about Athlon's scaling alone didn't seem appealing enough to me, so that I decided to put Intel's Pentium III against it. It wouldn't have been fair to run Pentium III at only up to 600 MHz, which is why I also included results of a Pentium III at 650/100 MHz. You can imagine that I was using a Pentium III 600 without multiplier-lock for this. Remembering my comments about failures of PIII 600 CPUs, actually also reported by several other publications in Germany and the UK, should give you an idea how hard it was to run all the benchmarks with an even overclocked PIII 650. Only one PIII 600 in the THG-lab was able to walk through all tests, and I had to use additional fans to keep the PIII 650 alive. This is not how it used to be. I always praised Intel CPUs as highly overclockable, but PIII 600 is different. The PIII 600 at 650 MHz was always just about able to finish the benchmarks, there was no way of running a system stably at this speed for several days.
Gigabyte's Athlon Platform
I used the Gigabyte GA-7IX motherboard for Athlon, because Brent was using the MSI-board for graphics cards tests in the Kryotech Cool Athlon 800-system. It showed that the GA-7IX is well capable to supply the current needed by an Athlon 750 without any additional cooling, so that my concerns about the missing heat sinks on the GA-7IX have disappeared. Still, the MSI MS-6176 scores slightly higher in graphics-benchmarks, so that my Athlon-results in Quake2 and Expendable could be even a little bit better. You might find that the results scored in this benchmark are a bit higher than in previously published Athlon-articles. This is due to the fact that I tweaked the Gigabyte GA-7IX to the same settings used in the
Athlon-motherboard article.
Asus P3B-F - The New Pentium III Reference-Platform
Intel's Pentium III was tested in the brand-new P3B-F from Asus. This board combines the stability and reliability of a typical Asus-motherboard with the overclocking-friendliness of Abit's BX6. Asus calls that feature 'jumperfree'. The P3B-F scores higher in benchmarks than a BX6 and it does not have power supply-issues with a Voodoo3 3500. You will see that several PIII-scores in this review are slightly higher than in the first Athlon-article we posted. This is due to using the P3B-F. Brent is currently working on a BX-motherboard review that will tell you more about the P3B-F.
Some Overclocking Details
I needed to change Athlon's core voltage a bit to run it at all the different clock speeds. You may think that I'm talking of higher voltages, but as a matter of fact the opposite was the case. Athlon would not run at 500 or 550 MHz unless I lowered the core voltage down to 1.45 V. On the other side, I only had to raise the core voltage from the default 1.6 V to 1.65 V and Athlon worked beautifully at 700 and 750 MHz. 800 MHz were left to the super-cooled Kryotech-Athlon, since I didn't want to tamper with my Athlon at higher voltages than 1.7 V and this was obviously not enough to run it at 800 MHz without Kryotech's cooling.
Pentium III used to 2 V for 500 and 550 MHz, the default of 2.05 V for 600 Mhz and for 650 MHz I raised the core-voltage to 2.1 V. Pentium III did definitely not like any higher voltage than that, it responded with definite crashes to 2.2 V.
Both processors are produced in .25µ-technology and so it's pretty impressive to see the differences. Intel's Pentium III can barely reach the 650 MHz at 2.1 V, while AMD's Athlon runs just fine at up to 750 MHz at only 1.65 V.
System Setup
Processor AMD Athlon 650, Intel Pentium III 600
Memory 128MB Crucial Technology PC133 ECC SDRAM, CAS2
Graphic Diamond Viper V770Ultra, NVIDIA reference driver 2.08
Hard Drive Western Digital WDAC 4180000 EIDE AMD Busmaster Driver, DMA-mode Intel Busmaster Driver,
DMA-mode FAT32 File System for Windows98 NTFS File System for Windows NT
Network Netgear FA310TX, 100BaseT full duplex
Operating
System Windows 98 / Windows NT 4 SP5, Resolution 1024x768x16x85]
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