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OCing the Athlon64 3000+

With expensive 939-pin CPUs dousing many enthusiast dreams, the 754-pin CPUs are coming back into focus with the help of ABIT and VIA's new K8T800Pro chipset.

Introduction:

As usual we are going to keep this short, sweet, and to the point.

Many of us have been waiting for many months now for the new 939-pin AMD CPUs to hit the store shelves. Undoubtedly, the 939-pin CPUs are a giant move in the right direction for AMD and provide superior gaming performance. The downside to the new CPUs is price. Even at the low end of the 939-pin Athlon64 spectrum, you can expect to pay around $500 for the CPU alone.

We understand that AMD is moving their products into new markets and trying to shake that "budget CPU" image and we are glad to see them go about that, but where does this leave the enthusiast? Reenter the 754-pin Athlon64.

I think that many of us were so excited about the coming of the dual channel memory controllers on the 939-pin Athlon64 CPUs that we sort of overlooked the 754-pin platform, or at least we did. Couple that with the fact that no motherboards on the market could lock the PCI/AGP to stock speeds while scaling the FSB and the 754-pin CPUs just were just not that appealing to the overall enthusiast community. Well that is all about to change, or at least we think so.

2.45GHz for Cheap

With a little tweaking and the right parts, for the price of a 3500+ CPU you can get great performance and have about $150 left over. Certainly this is cash that could be well spent on games this summer.

We started out with an Athlon64 3000+ 754-pin CPU that we had purchased from NewEgg last year when the CPU came out. Now of course we need a motherboard to help us along our way and currently the market for that is very slim. Not many companies have been looking "backwards" this time but ABIT has. To my knowledge they are first to market with a 754-pin motherboard that utilizes the new VIA K8T800Pro chipset. The KV8Pro motherboard has a bevy of overclocking features.

The ABIT KV8Pro is in stock now at NewEgg for a whopping $105 with free shipping. Combine this with our 3000+ CPU and we came away with some very interesting results.

Keep in mind that all Athlon64 CPUs have "Cool n' Quiet" technology. This means when enabled and the CPU is at idle, the core clock will be scaled down to use less energy thereby producing less heat allowing fan speeds to be reduced as well. The way AMD scales the CPU down is by adjusting the CPU's multiplier. This of course means that all CnQ CPUs from AMD are unlocked, in terms of moving down in integers. The FX series is fully unlocked. What you do need to be aware of is that not all motherboards will allow you to change the multipliers. If you plan on doing any hardcore OCing with the Athlon64 or FX, having the variable multiplier function is a must.

The other "must have" that the KV8Pro delivers is the ability to lock the PCI/AGP bus. With past K8 chipsets, the PCI and AGP buses have scaled with the FSB causing the PCI/AGP bus to be a limitation when overclocking. With the new K8T800Pro, we have the ability to "lock" the PCI/AGP bus to a spec 33/66MHz thus removing it from the equation. Overclocking your CPU no longer means OCing the PCI/AGP bus.

With that said, see what can be accomplished when scaling the multiplier down and the FSB up while the PCI/AGP bus is locked to spec speeds.

We were able to run our stock 3000+ (2GHz=200*10) at 2.45GHz (273*9) as seen in the above screen shot. At this rate however we could not get the Memory bus to cooperate with us as we had to scale the memory back very slow in order to get stability. Otherwise, the board ran stable, but the fact of the matter is that in a gaming environment the Memory bandwidth would have hindered your gaming.

Moving along, we brought the multiplier back up to a stock "10" and brought the FSB up to 245 with the Memory bus back to a near-stock 400MHz with our Ram at very tweaked timings.

As you can see in the full screen shot, we were able to run all sorts of software on the platform successfully. We stress tested the board at full load with 3D gaming programs as well for a period of days with not one glitch or failure.

Now screen shots of killer OCs are great, but where does this really get you in terms of CPU power?