Technical Feedback and Performance

First we will grab some sample information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feed back on the system temperatures. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate there software for this review. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for there support. We ran some tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Right off the bat we noticed extremely low temperatures. At Windows idle we ran around the 0.0°C ~ 1.0°C, With full load temperatures at 5.0°C ~ 5.5°C. However what we call Windows idle is not really Windows idle. Everest uses some processing power to gather these real time findings so we don't really get idle state statistics. The only problem with using software based applications to retrieve temperatures is the fact the mother-board environment sensors shut down and no longer report temperatures below 0.0°C, so we have to go to scientific and mathematical equations to come to a overall conclusion. 

Everest is reporting that we are running around the 0.0°C ~ 1.0°C mark. However the program does need some CPU power to process, so this is as close to idle that we can get using a software based utility such as this one. 

The CPU power used by the tool, fluctuates the processing power from 33% to 0% with a few spikes to 50% as we can see by the zig zag graph we see from the CPU usage history from within the performance tab of the Windows Task Manager. The application polls the CPU in intervals giving us a pulsating effect as seen above. So this is the best we can get to idle to sampling CPU core temperatures. 

Over Clocking Capabilities

Make no mistake, with the right hardware configuration this system can over-clock like a raped ape. Hehe, seriously though we can actually run this thing to over a half a GHz over-clock off a 2.2GHz 3500+ AMD Athlon64 Winchester core CPU using the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR, we received amazing results. Let's take a look.

This is the default configuration using default memory timings, default voltages. We used this to get a baseline for the Everest results, now we will take some results with the system over clocked to the hill and back. All we did here was pump up the FSB and left the ram at default. Let's check out the results!

Not bad at all, in fact this is rather damn good, the system ran off a default multiplier of 11.0, using 1.475 volts for the CPU and left the ram in Auto config. Needless to say this is one heck of a nice over clock with a 530 MHz increase in performance.

The over clock results were performed using Mushkins HP3200 2x512MB 991436 Redline series, which yielded a little more head room than our Corsair counterpart. However we are stilled ram limited, so this is the best we can go on our configuration. We basically stuffed the XPERT modules for the temperature test's and some bling, otherwise the faster Mushkin modules were used for the final maximum over-clock results.

This is the maximum stable over-clock we could get with a 11.0 multiplier using the Mushkin Redline series ram. I also ran the test with a multiplier of 10.0 and set the ram for a 5:6 ratio at 333MHz and then kicked up the FSB/HTT to 270.0 MHz to get about the same core speed, so right now our ram is limiting the overall overclock at this point. I would like to stuff some of OCZ's fastest DDR modules and see what we come up with...