AMD Athlon FX overclocking to 3Ghz: Creating a 'Gamebeast'

Cooling/CPU Cooling by Calantak @ 2004-10-18

This setup has all the bragging rights available, but is it actually worth its extreme price? Does buying an 800 euro cooling for your CPU improve your gaming experience? Do we need a 3Ghz FX? Find out in this overclocking extravaganza!

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Gaming Benchmarks

Game Benchmarks

Games we used:
  • Doom3 (+ beta patch)
  • Farcry (v1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament (v3270)

    All run in one go using the excellent Bench’emall! utility.

    Please do not compare these results to your own, these results were run specifically to compare the FX-53 at 2.4 to 3.0GHz too check on the performance increases, not to evaluate specific gaming conditions. What do you get for a 25% clock-increase? We divided our gaming tests in three.

  • First test: minimal detail setting and low resolutions to eliminate the GPU (video card) as a possible bottleneck.

    Madshrimps (c)
    16% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    15% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    15-20% increases


  • Second test: All detail settings to maximum (high quality for Doom 3) for all games, but without anti-aliasing (AA) nor anisotropic filtering (AF). Please remember that Doom3 enables 8*AF in high quality.

    Madshrimps (c)
    14% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    16% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    16% increases



  • Third test: I decided to go all out and enabled 4*AA / 8 * AF at 1280*1024. This puts the most of the calculation load on the graphics card:

    Madshrimps (c)
    4% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    nothing %


    Notice the minimal increase in FPS with 600Mhz extra Athlon FX-53 power. In Doom 3 the X800XT Platinum edition is our limiting factor, even a 4Ghz Athlon FX could not make this game playable at the selected resolution and detail levels. If you think I should have included a test with an nVidia 6800 Ultra Extreme feel free to throw one my way :-).

    Madshrimps (c)
    14% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    0% increase


    Same situation here with Farcry, it is very demanding with 4*anti-aliasing enabled

    Madshrimps (c)
    16% increase


    Madshrimps (c)
    0.5-15% increase…


    Unreal Tournament 2004 is less stressing on our hardware; it even manages to show increases when running with the high details and resolution.
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