Overclocking/System Setup

Overclocking

We know you're dying to hear how high we were able to overclock our Gigahertz Pentium III system. We had disappointing results with our Pentium III 933 so we weren't expecting much going into the testing. After 136 and 138MHz ran flawlessly at default voltage, (1.7V for the 1GHz processor) we actually began to get our hopes up. Unfortunately, our overclocking attempts ended abruptly at 140MHz. (1,050MHz final clock speed)

Despite increasing the voltage to as much as 1.85V, the system refused to get past the Windows 98 splash screen at any other front side bus setting.

Test System Setup

AMD Athlon 1GHz "Thunderbird"
FIC motherboard manufactured for Compaq
Intel Pentium III 1GHz
Abit BF6 motherboard
128MB PC133 SDRAM

Western Digital Caviar ATA-66 hard drive

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR SDRAM
Driver version: 5.22 (5.23 on the Athlon system)

Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

Winbench99 - CPU Marks
Winbench99 - FPU Marks
Winbench99 - Business disk marks
Winbench99 - High-end disk marks
Business Winstone99
Winstone2000 - Content Creation

3DMark2000 - 800x600x16
3DMark2000 - 800x600x32
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x16
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x32

SiSoft Sandra 2000 - Dhrystone
SiSoft Sandra 2000 - Whetstone
SiSoft Sandra 2000 - CPU/memory bandwidth
SiSoft Sandra 2000 - FPU/memory bandwidth
SiSoft Sandra 2000 - MMX

Quake 3 Retail - 512x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x1024 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1600x1200 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

Notes

For this article we've taken the numbers from our original Thunderbird preview and compared them to our 1GHz Pentium III testbed. We've also run numbers under similar conditions with MSI's K7T Pro motherboard, but the results from our Thunderbird preview were a bit higher so we stuck with those.

For the Pentium III system we stuck with the platform used by most of our readers: the BX chipset. With newer BX motherboards (and BIOS releases) from ASUS, MSI, Abit, and others, 133MHz has become a fairly safe setting. In fact, the retail packaging on newer Abit BE6-II and BF6 motherboards proudly proclaims the boards as "BX133"!