- Intel Pentium 4 520 2.8GHZ
- Abit AA8-Duramax
- ATI Radeon X800XT
- Swiftech MCX775-V
The Abit AA8 motherboard is one of the best Intel 925X motherboards available. It offers great features and BIOS overclocking options with VDIMM up to 2.25v. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug when using 2.25v so all testing is done with a max of 2.2v. The memory ratio was kept at DDR533 as the DDR600 divider has a bug and fails to POST when selected. The CPU is Intel's lowest line of LGA775 CPUs. This CPU was chosen mainly because it is highly overclockable and has the lowest multiplier of 14x.
There is another CPU that allows a multiplier of 12x but I don't justify spending $1000 on a CPU. I'm sure you all would agree with me. The motherboard topped out at 265FSB, which is impressive to say nonetheless. I tested the overclocking process with a 3.6GHZ CPU with a 14x multiplier and achieved the same results. This was done to make sure that the CPU wasn't the bottleneck. Overclocking testing was done first at 266MHz to see the lowest latencies possible. Then it was raised to 337MHz (PC2-5400) speeds to see the lowest timings allowed. Then the memory loosens to 4-4-4 to find the highest memory frequency possible.
Testing Procedures
Testing includes a series of memory intensive benchmarks such as 3DMark2001SE, PCMark2002, PCMark2004, SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth, and two games-Far Cry and UT2K4.
