Testing

The rest of the test rig was as follows:

Motherboard: Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard
Memory: 1gb (2*512) OCZ PC2 6400 memory
Graphics Card: Sapphire x1900XT
Power Supply: Hiper TypeR 580w PSU

The tests I ran during the testing phase were as follows: SuperPi mod, Sisoft Sandra CPU arithmetic, Sisoft Sandra multimedia, 3dMark01, 3dMark03, 3dMark05 and for some real world tests, the demo run through benchmark built into the FEAR demo (The settings were "Maximum" on "Computer" ", "Maximum" on "Graphics Card") and the X3 reunion demo benchmark.

Stock

Wow, just wow. Those figures are absolutely astounding. The Sandra multimedia and SuperPi scores particularly. The SuperPi score is over 8 seconds faster than my old AMD 3500+ when it was overclocked to within an inch of its life (And ran at 350mhz than the E6600 does at stock). The Sandra multimedia score is also over 4 times higher than the AM2 3800 I tested the other day, which as you can imagine is an insane difference!

Although I was impressed to the point of drooling with the speed of this CPU at stock speeds I still wanted to see how far I could push it. I had been told a relatively safe voltage for this type of CPU on air is 1.4v so I stuck the voltage at that, stuck a large divider on the ram and began upping the FSB. So confident was I in this boards overclockability that I upped the FSB in rather large amounts as apposed to my usual method of "slowly but surely".

200...
280...
320...
350...
360...
365...

I hit a wall at 365FSB - an overclock of 840mhz - and had the processor sitting comfortably at 3.29ghz. Nothing huge by Conroe standards, but nonetheless a very satisfying performance boost. I would put a bit more voltage through this CPU with better cooling, but that will come another day. However even at these volts the temperatures were not horrendous, only just bumping above 40 degrees C at full load.

Now, onto the overclocked benchmarks:

15.5! 15.5 seconds on Superpi! This is under half the speed of my old 3500+! Excuse the overuse of exclamation marks but I was again gob smacked by the performance of this chip. The 3dmark runs show the expected increases (Less as the years increase as the software becomes more graphically intensive) as do the Sandra runs. Both gaming benchmarks shows a nice increase in FPS, more so in X3 than FEAR but that game is renowned as being more graphically than CPU intensive.