Hae-Yu
05-28-2006, 06:08 AM
Tom's Hardware (http://www6.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/) has a great read on the new overclocking champ - the lowly Pentium D 850. The dual core chip retails for $130 +/- on Newegg and is sold with a marginal rating of 2.66GHz and 133MHz FSB. Not so impressive.
However, the article tests the chips at speeds up to 4.3GHz, with 4.1GHz being the sweet spot. The FSB was cranked up to 200MHz with DDR2-800 memory. Overall, it outperformed the high end chips from AMD and Intel in almost every benchmark.
The article's intro is a bit misleading - to get 4.0GHz and above, they had to use watercooling - a not-so-cheap option (new case, cooling, etc). However, it sure beats $1G for a Pentium EE 965 or Athlon 64 FX-60. To get solid performance increase - 3.3GHz - they were able to use the included cooler and for only a few more dollars, they could crank up the entire 3 Gig spectrum with a standard 3rd party cooler. The increased output results in dramatically higher power consumption and probably noise too (depending on cooling).
Motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte were successfully tested along with various configurations. For those building a new system from scratch, they should give these serious consideration. Though the article is 45 pages, most of are screenshots with only a few sentences.
However, the article tests the chips at speeds up to 4.3GHz, with 4.1GHz being the sweet spot. The FSB was cranked up to 200MHz with DDR2-800 memory. Overall, it outperformed the high end chips from AMD and Intel in almost every benchmark.
The article's intro is a bit misleading - to get 4.0GHz and above, they had to use watercooling - a not-so-cheap option (new case, cooling, etc). However, it sure beats $1G for a Pentium EE 965 or Athlon 64 FX-60. To get solid performance increase - 3.3GHz - they were able to use the included cooler and for only a few more dollars, they could crank up the entire 3 Gig spectrum with a standard 3rd party cooler. The increased output results in dramatically higher power consumption and probably noise too (depending on cooling).
Motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte were successfully tested along with various configurations. For those building a new system from scratch, they should give these serious consideration. Though the article is 45 pages, most of are screenshots with only a few sentences.