Over the course of the week, I noticed my system wasn’t performing quite as good as I’d expected. Though my system appeared stable, hosting a game of UT2004 revealed some instability. I knocked the speed back down to 3000+ for the game, but was determined to get that speed back.

Tuesday evening, I returned to explore the source of the problem only to discover I had forgotten to up the core voltage on the CPU when I pushed it to 3200+. Upping VCore to from 1.65 to 1.675 did the trick. The next boot was fast and clean, and everything performed just as expected. I wasn’t quite done yet though. I finally felt the need to find the upper limit of my CPU.
So, back into the BIOS I went. I was pleasantly surprised. Set the multiplier to 11.5, post. Back in to BIOS, check health.. still good. Reboot into windows and benchmark it. Still no problems. 12x is where the party stopped. At 2400Mhz my trusty Athlon XP 2500+ (a 1.8Ghz CPU) would post, and appeared healthy, but wouldn’t boot into Windows. I left well enough alone. 🙂

The above results were generated by SiSoft Sandra v2004.10.9.89. At 2300Mhz, my Athlon XP managed an ALU score of 8720 MIPS, and an FPU score of 3591 MFLOPS. That top mark that it’s beating is an Intel P4-B 2.8Ghz CPU with HyperThreading turned on. The FPU scores are the Yellow and Red bars. The yellow is the closest to an apples-to-apples comparison as it leaves out iSSE2 which is only available on the P4. The scale on the graph is from 0 to 100,000.