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AMD Athlon 3000+ Overclocking, going for 100% OC on Dry Ice

Overclocking/Overclocking Tests by massman @ 2007-05-06

We overclock a golden oldie, the Athlon 3000+ was a favorite among hardware enthusiasts back in May 2005, now-a-days it´s Core 2 Duo, but with the help of some Dry Ice we can extract a bit more power from this AMD CPU. Read on to find out if we reach our 100% overclocking goal.

OC Results and Conclusive Thoughts

Overclocking Results

Well what do I have to show for after 2 days of running the 3000+ at subzero temperatures?

A maximum speed of 3603Mhz which translates into a 100% overclock!

Unfortunately this high speed did not prove stable enough to complete the benchmarks I ran earlier, I had to drop the speed back to a more modest 3.2Ghz which was still 1400Mhz over stock speed!

Hexus PiFast 39.03s
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SuperPi 1M: 25.91s
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SuperPi 32M: 24m 02.298s
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wPrime 32M: 52.27s

wPrime 1024M: 30m 11.36s

Overall the results were far from bad, but I had hoped for better, comparing the scores of the benchmarks with maximum overclocking on air cooling vs dry ice gives this chart:

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Conclusive Thoughts

Dry Ice allows for cheap sub zero cooling for those occasional benchmark sessions, it gives you enough time to experiment with different settings and run a few benchmark to assess the performance you can extract from a setup like this AMD A64 3000+.

With better cooling (LN² , multiple stage phase change cooling) I’m confident this CPU can grab the world overclocking record, as it stands I have to settle for third place Madshrimps (c)

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While a good CPU is essential to get anywhere, the motherboard can not be overlooked, the DFI nForce4 S939 motherboards are the best out there, the Ultra-D and SLI-D proved this during my benchmark session, but there’s one more… the DFI Expert motherboard adds more control over the different BIOS settings, and one in particular could have helped me: memory dividers!

The Ultra-D and Sli-D allow you to set the memory async to the FSB, so you can run your CPU at high speed while keeping the memory speed in spec, the current dividers offered are 100/133/166/200, the DFI Expert adds one more, 143Mhz; which comes in handy with these BH-5 Winbond modules. Swapping the 2x256 for 2x512Mb sticks can also increase performance… but overall with the gear I had to work with the results obtained today were not disappointing.

Working with sub zero cooling always entails preventing condensation where ever possible; I used the right materials and isolated the motherboard easily, running below zero 2 days in a row the board survived.

To give you an idea of the performance difference of the average Overclocked A64 3000+ vs Overclocked Core 2 Duo E6300 we use HWbot's nifty comparison tool.

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I hope you enjoyed reading this OC adventure, until next time, click the banner below to read up on our previous overclocking endeavors:

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