Benchmarks:

On our rig we used the NVIDIA 66.70 Beta drivers which was used for the Aquamark 3 score. The ForceWare drivers where left at default, no nulling of pixel shaders was performed or even condoned for that matter. It was a simple as loading the drivers, loading Aquamark 3 under all windows service processes and then benchmarking the system. Nothing was shutdown from task manager - we have 30 processes running while benchmarking.

Aquamark 3:

• AquaMark Score: 73080

• 5939 PC Marks.

• Dhrystone ALU: 9896MIPS
• Whetstone FPU: 4082MFLOPS
• Whetstone iSSE2: 6986MFLOPS

Processor
Model : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.40GHz
Speed : 3.40GHz
Performance Rating : PR4522 (estimated)
CPUs per Core : 1 Unit(s)
Type : Standard
L2 On-board Cache : 1024kB ECC Synchronous ATC (8-way sectored, 64 byte line size)

Chipset 1
Model : Intel Corporation 925x Memory Controller Hub
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 200MHz (800MHz data rate)

Features
SSE2 Technology : Yes
SSE3 Technology : Yes
HTT - Hyper-Threading Technology : Yes

Test No. 2

SiSoftware Sandra CPU Arithmetic Test at 3.91GHz

• Dhrystone ALU : 11343MIPS
• Whetstone FPU : 4673MFLOPS
• Whetstone iSSE2 : 8087MFLOPS

Processor
Model : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.40GHz
Speed : 3.91GHz
Performance Rating : PR5200 (estimated)
CPUs per Core : 1 Unit(s)
Type : Standard
L2 On-board Cache : 1024kB ECC Synchronous ATC (8-way sectored, 64 byte line size)

Chipset 1
Model : Intel Corporation 925x Memory Controller Hub
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 230MHz (920MHz data rate)

Features
SSE2 Technology : Yes
SSE3 Technology : Yes
HTT - Hyper-Threading Technology : Yes

For our Sandra test we used the executable downloaded from SiSoftware san2004.SP2b-9133-Win32-SSO.exe. The version we used was SiSoftware Sandra Standard Unicode (win32 x86) 2004.10.9.133

Again we left all the processes running as we want real world results. We rebooted windows after installing Sandra and then performed the test's. Overclocking to 3.9GHz pushed some decent Sandra score's and was rather impressed with the results.

• New Core Speed: 4012.6 MHz
• Multiplier: x 17.0
• FSB: 236.0 MHz
• Bus Speed: 944.1 MHz

This is over a 600MHz overclock off a stock retail box Intel Prescott HSF. Latest in the news suggest Intel will not be releasing a 4GHz LGA775 Prescott. With this board you can and will definately run at 4GHz without the release. If the Pentium 4 550 we are using can overclock this well, we can only emagine what the Pentium 4 560 & 570 can do. (3.6GHz - 3.8GHz)

At the time of this review we did not have the 570 in our possession. While we do have one on order, we experienced some delay's in shipping and at this time cannot provide analysis with this cpu. Nor did we have watercooling, we are waiting on a innovatek kit.

The retail Prescott HSF has a solid copper clad core so this also aids in the overclockability. Which to be honest the stock intel cooler is probly one of the best HSF for your Prescott at the moment.

The Corsair ram we used was left at stock timings 4-4-4-12, nothing was changed in the BIOS to boost the rams performance. We did up the CPU volts from 1.3v to 1.45v and left everything else at default settings.

The Operating system is loaded as if it was a fully functional entertainment system with games applications, printer drivers, etc., In fact we are editing this review on the very system. We feel loading this test rig as if it was a daily user will prove to be a better test subject. Real world results are not based on installing a operating system then benching hoping a fresh install will give you better performance. So we decided to load background services that of a family used computer entertainment system and performed our benchmarks under these conditions.

*Note* While running at 4.012GHz the 2D windows environment ran stable. Applications like Office, Photoshop all runs just fine. However 3D games and benchmarks creates BSODs and therefore its up to the reader to figure out the pro's and con's to overclocking a pentium 4 550 to 4GHz. Funny thing was at just a lower clock to 3.961GHz the system runs D3D stable enough to play games and run benchmarks. I suspect a water cooling kit will fix this little issue. On the other hand a Pentium 4 570 would run well over 4GHz on this board.