Performance

With the install out of the way, it is now time for the fun part – the testing. For this we are using the default fan speeds, which are 2200rpm for fan1 and 1400rpm for fan2. We did try reducing the fans for some tests however the unit became noticeably hot to touch so it doesn't seem like this is a great idea and increasing the fans had no affect on over clocking, it only appeared to make the VapoChill noisier.

Test Systems

INTEL:
Intel Core2 Duo X6800 (2.93Ghz)
Intel D975XBX
2x1Gb Corsair DDR2-1066 (4-4-4-12 @ 800Mhz)

AMD:
AMD Athlon64 FX-60 (2.6Ghz)
Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe
2x512mb OCZ PC4800 DDR

2xX1900XT 512Mb in Crossfire
WD Raptor 74Gb Sata Drive
Enermax Noisetaker 600w PSU
Sony D710A DVD Writer
AOC 19” CRT

Windows XP SP2
.Net FW 2.0
Catalyst 6.6 WHQL
DirectX 9.0c August 2006

Sisoft Sandra 2007
PCMark05

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the system drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2, DirectX 9.0c and .NET Framework 2.0 (latest service pack). Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:

Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications had their latest patches applied. Additionally the overclock achieved was put through a 24 stability test to ensure that they could be used at all times.

Temperature readings:

Temp readings were taken through the bios and also windows utilities. The Evaporator temperature was also monitored via the onboard LED display and it idled at -45 to -50 degrees and under load never went above -30 degrees C on either CPU being tested.

AMD Overclocking

The FX-60 is a fast dual core CPU at stock speeds, its also the second fastest Athlon available in terms of clockspeeds at 2.6Ghz, with only the FX-62 being clocked higher. This indicates that there might not be a lot of over clocking headroom left in the core and it would be a challenge to reach extreme speeds. Because we are using the VapoChill LS we are able to use the maximum voltage available to the CPU which comes in at approximately 1.6v. (This is the highest available on the A8R32-MVP.) After setting this option and confirming the CPU temperatures were under control at load and at idle we began the process of overclocking the CPU. As this is an FX CPU we have the ability to change HTT speeds as well as the processor multiplier in order to achieve various results.

The highest result we reached at 1.6v was 3394mhz, an overclock of just under 800mhz on the FX-60. This speed was achieved by using a multiplier of 15.5 with a HTT speed of 219Mhz (13x200 stock).

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Temperatures when overclocked were of course very low. The highest we saw under load on the FX-60 was -9 degrees Celsius and at idle the system happily sat at -22.

Intel Overclocking

After the run on AMD we were full of confidence and decided to take a crack at running the VapoChill LS on our lovely new Core2 X6800 CPU.

As the Core2/D975XBX is a new system to us we were pretty much in at the deep end and learning the bios settings the system liked, voltages the CPU could handle and really had no idea how high it would go. Again this is a CPU where FSB and multiplier changes are available to us so we can really tweak easily. Our over clocking tests were very successful to say the least. Using a voltage of 1.5v (higher is possible however didn't improve our results) we were able to reach a very impressive 4100Mhz. This is an overclock of 1170Mhz on the CPU. The overclock was achieved using a 14x multiplier with a 293Mhz FSB (11x266stock). We were able to reach 4.15Ghz however the system failed our stress test after about 6-7 hours and so we settled for a rock solid 4.1Ghz.

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Idle and load temps were comparable on the Core2 and AMD systems however the Core2 temps are more impressive due to the much higher over clock level.