Testing

The rest of the test rig was as follows:

Asus M2NE Motherboard
512mb OCZ PC2 6400
Leadtek 6600gt
Enermax Liberty 400w

The tests I ran during the testing phase were as follows: SuperPi mod, 3dMark01, Sisoft Sandra CPU arithmetic, Sisoft Sandra multimedia and for a real world test, the demo run through benchmark built into the FEAR demo (The demo was run at "Medium CPU", "Medium Graphics").

Stock

As you can see for an entire system built for just over £300 (and only £100 on the CPU!), it gets some quite respectable scores. However it was at this point that I decided to see how much I could overclock with the stock heatsink in place.

200...
210...
215...
225...
235

I hit a wall at 235FSB - an overclock of 350mhz - that voltages nor dividers would not change. Not the best overclock ever but I am sure that with a more lucky CPU and a much nicer cooler you would be able to achieve much better overclocks than me. For reference, the CPU was idling at 47c by this point.

With these extra clocks in place I re-ran the benchmarks again to see the difference the overclock makes:

Well the CPU overclock seemed to make a nicely sized difference to everything apart from the gaming benchmark, which isn't too surprising as FEAR is much more graphically intensive as apposed to CPU intensive.