Duron 650 Overclocking Results

SUMMARY: The flexibility of settings FSBs and multipliers gives the Duron some added performance benefits.

As I continue to play with the Duron 650/Asus A7V, I see some value in having the flexibility to vary both the CPU’s multiplier and FSBs. For example, it looks like the stable best I can do with this CPU is 927 MHz (water cooling). Now I can get 927 two ways – 9 x 103 and 8.5 x 109 with the following performance differences:

Benchmark

9 x 103

8.5 x 109

% Diff

Si Sandra CPU/FPU

2591/1292

2595/1292

0.2/NA

Si Sandra Mult Med

3159/4332

3159/4330

NA/NA

Si Sandra Memory

444/548

466/581

4.9/6.0%

3DMark 2000

7399

7532

1.8%

Quake

127.7/123.1

131.4/127.2

2.9/3.3%

Content Creation

33.9

34.2

0.9%

Pi Solver

846

818

3.3%

Duron 650, ASUS A7V, Leadtek GTS2, 128 MB HSDRAM, Monitor @ 800 x 600.

The difference in FSBs of 5.8% translates into 5-6% higher Si Sandra Memory scores – basically a 1-1 benefit. What is interesting is the relatively uneven impact it has on performance; it ranges from about 3% in Quake’s frame rates to less than 1% in Winstone Content Creation – I would have expected more improvement in this app-intensive benchmark.

Kevin Tam sent me a new (to me) benchmark – Pi Solver. What this does is stress the CPU by finding “X” places of Pi – up to 32 million. What’s nice about this one is it not only stresses the CPU but records how many seconds it takes to get “X” places. In this instance, for 4 million places, at 8.5 x 109 it took 818 seconds – 3.3% better than at 9 x 103 (Note: 32 million places @ 927 took 4 hours, 5 minutes and 19 seconds).

The bottom line is that memory intensive apps, like image or sound editing, will show a performance improvement without any penalties (assuming your peripherals like the higher FSB).

Just for giggles, I also benched the Duron 650 with W98SE and W2000 @ 800 MHz with the following results:

Benchmark

W98 SE

W 2000

% Diff

Si Sandra CPU/FPU

2256/1125

2248/1125

-0.4/NA

Si Sandra Mult Med

2750/3771

2684/3441

-2.4/-2.8%

Si Sandra Memory

436/537

446/522

2.2/-2.8%

3DMark 2000

6908

2971

-57.0%

Quake

117.7/113.9

96.8/90.1

-17.8/-20.9%

Content Creation

32.2

42.7

32.6%

Duron 650, ASUS A7V, Leadtek GTS2, 128 MB HSDRAM, Monitor @ 800 x 600.

Let’s chalk up the gaming gaps to “immature video drivers” and leave it at that. However, the Content Creation scores are a shocker – no doubt NT is “industrial grade”, but by this much?? We have seen similar results with the T-bird, so we will be doing more testing on this issue.

At this juncture, I am pleased with running a Duron 650 at what appears to be a stable 927 MHz (1.85 v) – a 50% overclock. I am going to set this up as one of my main systems, continue to use it in everyday apps and see how it behaves.

Email Joe


Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply