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Overclocking
Acorp
7KT266A Motherboards |
Is it worth it?? |
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When it
came to overclocking the 7KT266A, we were not
impressed. Without the ability to adjust the CPU
multiplier, we were limited to adjusting the BUS-speed
only. Although the system ran fine at its default 133MHz.
BUS, once we started to raise the frequency, stability
faltered rather quickly. After hitting just 138MHz. the
system would not post without us adjusting the memory
timings to their most conservative settings, more
specifically, the CAS, Active to Precharge(Tras) and Active
to CMD(Trcd)
settings. Once the changes were made we tried again and
reached a maximum stable BUS-speed of 145MHz. We feel it is
important to note that we used the exact same components as
in previous KT266A reviews where we were able to max this
CPU to over 1.5GHz. The breakdown in performance may quite
possibly be with our equipment, but in this case we doubt
it. Nonetheless, we had to settle for 145MHz. BUS-Speed
with the memory timings set at their most conservative. Below youll see the results of the
over clock attempt
using SiSoft Sandra 2002 with the CPU running at a peak
1303MHz.
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HotHardware Test Systems |
Athlon All the Way!! |
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AMD Athlon @ 1200MHz.
Acorp 7KT266A Rev. 1.1 Via KT266A
256MB IBM PC2100
(CAS 2)
GeForce 3 Ti500
(23.11 Drivers)
Hercules Game
Theater XP
Seagate Barracuda
IV ATA100 7200RPM 20GB HD
Creative 52X
CD-ROM
Standard Floppy
Drive
Windows XP
Professional
DirectX 8.1
Via 4-in-1s
v.4.37's
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Benchmarking with Sisoft Sandra 2002 Pro |
Starting with the Synthetic... |
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The first
benchmark we'll run is SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro. Sandra
is a synthetic benchmarking application that does a fine job
at comparing a system to other popular hardware
configurations. This utility demonstrates the board's
performance results in relation to some reference
configurations. Will the Acorp 7KT266A hold it's own
or will the competition gobble it up? Let's take a
look.
CPU@1200MHz.
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CPU@1303MHz.
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Multimedia@1200MHz.
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Multimedia@1303MHz.
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Memory@1200MHz.
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Memory@1303MHz.
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Hard Drive Performance
As we've seen with all aspects
of the Sandra test scores, the Acorp's performance was on par with
similar systems across the board. You can see when
comparing the over clocked numbers, there were some gains in
the CPU tests but the memory scores yielded little extra
performance. If we were able to maintain this
relatively moderate over clock with more aggressive timings,
the gain would probably be more worth it. In this
case, we see little reason to stress this board beyond spec,
the gains are not worth it. But that doesn't make it a
bad motherboard. Clearly by now we can see that this board
is geared toward the workstation and low-end server market rather than
the high-octane enthusiasts boards that we are so used to
working with. With that said, let us move on to more
'real-world' benchmarking to see how this board performs
under real stress.
The Winstones and Quake 3 |