![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, March 31, 2004
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Editor:
- Steve Lynch
- Google +1
Overclocking the Prescott 2.4A
The Pentium 4 2.4A CPU comes through with shining results in our overclocking tests. No fooling!
Non-Stock OC
While stock overclocking can be fun and rewarding, many of us know there is nothing like taking a CPU to the edge. And while what we are doing here is certainly not "extreme", it does take a bit better cooling and a bit of handiwork in a BIOS to smooth off the rough edges.
Our Non-Stock OC consists of pushing the CPU as far as it could go with a Koolance Exos water cooling system and voltage tweaking. This system is not chilled, supplying only radiator cooled water to a CPU heatsink. There is likely more headroom with this CPU but we would need to explore a more active cooling solution, such as vapor phase, chilled water, or peltier cooling techniques.
As you can see above, our core voltage was increased to 1.625 volts in order to reach a stable 3.7GHz. Pushing the voltage past this point did nothing to further stabilize our 2.4A. Try as we might to push our 2.4A up another 10MHz in clock speed to get to the 3.7GHz mark without rounding up just proved to not be doable while maintaining any level of stability. Still it is hard to complain about a 1.3GHz overclock!
The stability levels that we discussed with our stock OC were the same here. While the CPU does not meet the standard that we usually use to describe "stable", it did stay very operational and user friendly for gaming and other tasks. To sum it up, it ran just fine at 3.7GHz and we felt that with a bit more of an aggressive cooling solution, we could have pushed on further.
Benchmark Comparisons
A few basic benchmarks were run to give you an idea of the computing power gained with our overclocking.
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
From top to bottom we see over a 30% increase in memory bandwidth supplied as the memory bus rises in a 1:1 ratio with our FSB in our testing. Even our stock overclock nets a 24% increase.
SiSoft Sandra CPU ALU Benchmark
Again we see some very impressive percentage gains at these speeds from our $150 CPU. From top to bottom we see a computation net increase of 28%.
3DMark 2001SE
The increases that we saw in our above synthetic benchmarks are once again shadowed here in our 3DMark2001 numbers. There is just no denying the power of such a large overclock even at such high GHz rates.