The next one to two weeks are likely to be busy ones from the review perspective.
We’ll probably see reviews of the Radeon 9800 Pro this week, though only the 3DMarkers are likely to buy a lot of them any time soon.
Intel will come up with its Canterwood motherboards, and for these, I have a little request to make:
As we’ve said before, the 200MHz FSB CPU will present new challenges to overclockers, simply because you can’t get memory running a ton faster than 200MHz.
For the 200MHz chips to become prime overclocking candidates, the Canterwood (and later Springfield) motherboards will to allow you to run memory speed lower than FSB.
So, for instance, you would run the FSB at close to 300MHz, and the memory at 230 or so, and that would maximize both overclocking and memory speed performance.
Should that not prove to be the case, it will be pretty hard to overclock 200MHz FSB CPUs much.
Preliminary indications are that at least some Canterwoods boards should allow this.
It will be important to determine which Canterwood mobos can and which can’t do something like this.
If, in the next few days, you run across any online Canterwood manuals from the mobo makers, could you please drop me a note with the link to it in case you see it before me? Thanks!
Of course, just because a motherboard has the settings for such a thing doesn’t mean it will actually work at such high speeds. That’s phase two.
This approach will probably be bleeding edge stuff for a while, with plenty of expensive casualties, and I suspect those overclockers averse to risk (or just not willing to pay top dollar for memory) would be better off using 133MHz CPUs with these boards.
Be the first to comment