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Overclocking

After some initial teething problems with the early Winchester cores, they have, in general, been very solid overclockers. Of the three Winchester based 3000+'s in the lab, one does 2.45 Ghz, the second does 2.56 Ghz while the third is a bit of a dud. With the Venice 3800+, we were able to stay stable at 2.89 Ghz (241 * 12) with the voltage tweaked to 1.57V in the BIOS (CPU-Z reports it to be 1.55V) so we did not quite manage to break the 3.0 Ghz barrier.

The 3800+ survived a weekend of Prime95 at 2892 Mhz

Hardware Setup

What better way is there to quantify improvements than good old benchmarking? We include a few other processors in the mix and play around with the clockspeed of the Venice 3800+ to try to get a grasp on what kind of improvements AMD has made.

Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice) @ 2211 Mhz (200.9 x 12)
Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice) @ 2892 Mhz (241 x 12)
Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice) @ 1808 Mhz (200.9 x 9)
Athlon 64 3000+ (Winchester) @ 1808 Mhz (200.8 x 9)
Pentium 4 520 @ 3000 Mhz
Pentium 4 560J @ 3600 Mhz
DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D (nForce 4 Stand alone driver kit 6.53)
NVIDIA nForce 4 Intel Reference Board (nForce 4 driver revision 7.02)
NVIDIA 6600GT (ForceWare 66.93)
OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition VX @ 2-2-2-8-1T
Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL @ 3-2-2-7-1T
Western Digital WD1200 SATA Drive

Windows XP SP2

All testing on the AMD side was done on the DFI LanParty nF4 Ultra board using OCZ's PC4000 memory while the Intel side was paired up with Corsair's 5400UL DDR2. The clock generator on the DFI board is slightly above 200 Mhz at stock LDT speeds and the actual clockspeeds of each of the processors as noted by CPU-Z have been noted. For the overclocked Venice, memory was run at a 1:1 ratio; we also ran through most of the benchmark suite with a 5:6 memory divider but for legibility reasons, they were left off the published benchmarks. We did find that the numbers were on average, 7% lower for games. Anyone who wants the exact numbers can leave a message on the forum and the numbers can be posted there.

Test Setup

SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark
Rightmark Memory Analyzer
PCMag Winstone 2004
WinRAR Compression Rate
POV-Ray
CineBench
LAME 3.90.3 MP3 Encoding
TMPGenc MPEG2 Encoding
AutoGK XviD Encoding
Comanche 4
Call of Duty
Jedi Knight 2
Halo
Half-Life 2
Far Cry
DOOM 3
X2: Rolling Demo
UT2k4

A couple new additions to our benchmark suite is the rendering test with CineBench and a compression rate test with WinRAR.