Overclocking & BIOS



In the DFI BIOS you’ll find almost every possible setting you could use to overclock or tweak your configuration. Let’s take a quick look at the most commonly used ones.

Voltages

The cpu vid, the actual core voltage, can be selected from 1,0 volt up to 1,6 Volt in steps of 0,005 volt. This makes it possible to select very precisely what voltage you want. If that wouldn’t be enough there is also the CPU VID Special Add. With that you can raise the actual voltage up to 121% (starting at 100% in steps of 0,1 %). Meaning you can supply the cpu up to a very nice 1,94 volt.



Frequencies

The multiplier of Athlon 64 processors is unlocked downwards (except for the Athlon FX series). With this particular CPU you can choose any multiplier from 4x up to 11x (the default setting.)

The CPU/C51 HTT Frequency, which is the bus the CPU uses to communicate with the rest of the system can be set from 100 up to 500 in steps of 2.

Both the 16x PCIe slots speed can also be chosen and changed independently.




Extra - other

DFI added the possibility to work with overclocking profiles in BIOS. And of course you also have the monitoring menu.




And finally we have the memory timings:




Obtained results

With the very flexible BIOS I could squeeze out a nifty 340 HTT speeds. But the memory speed wasn't ideal using this setting. Using the 1:2 DDR:Memory "divider" I could reach up to 600 Mhz DDR at timings cas 4 -4-4-10. I had to push about 2.6 Volt through the memory. But this was all possible trough BIOS. No special modifications were needed.

In the end I settled at a HTT speed of 290 Mhz and a memory speed of 580 Mhz (4-4-4-10). Higher clock speeds were possible, but not using air-cooling.


Performance



With the 3d mark with can already see the differences. The older the 3d mark, the more CPU dependency we see.

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And so we see it in the games....

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Now the extra 700 Mhz cpu can be noticed the most with the SuperPi tests. Using the 1M setting we drop from 39 second to about 28 seconds.

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The performance increases we're seeing here below in the Sisoft Sandra tests seem to have pretty well reflected into the other applications tested above. From 20 to 30% increase is surely not bad.

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Photoshop

Driverheaven made this pretty nifty PhotoShop Benchmark which is basically a collection of actions performed on an image and the time measured for each operation.

Using Adobe Photoshop CS 2 we ran trough this benchmark in 167,1 seconds with the overclocked configuration. About 25% faster.

How does it compare to Core 2 ? ->