L O S T C I R C U I T S

The most interesting part of any review are the benchmarks and the overclocking capabilities, at least for me.

Overclocked Stability

With the memory bus set to 4/3 FSB, up to 107 MHz bus speed, the A7V was running very stable with two lockups in Sysmark2000 as the glitches encountered. Running the memory bus at 1:1 FSB:SDRAM settings, the board could be overclocked to 111 MHz bus speed which was the highest bus speed to run stable, regardless of the multiplier selection. Thus, clock speed limitations of the CPU can be excluded as the possible culprit which stays with either the KT chipset or else the bus threshold of the CPU.

Business Performance

Content Creation Winstone2000

When Intel moved from the Katmai core with the backside cache to the coppermine with its integrated L2 cache, business performance scores skyrocketed. So what can we expect from a similar change of architecture in the Athlon?

Content Creation Winstone2000 scores at 1 GHz and 1070 MHz
Even at stock settings (100 MHz x 10), the Thunderbird / AV7 combo sets a new milestone by breaking the 40 point barrier. Overclocked to 107 MHz x 10, the scores soar even higher to over 41 points. Under Windows98, these are the highest scores I have ever been able to achieve.

Sysmark 2000

In a recent review of the ASUS CUSL, the FC-PGA PIII 933 overclocked to 1 GHz barely missed the 200 point rubicon in overall Sysmark performance. At stock settings, the Thunderbird also crosses this barrier, only to be surpassed by the scores obtained at 1050 MHz (105 MHz x 10). At 1070 MHz, the system would complete the benchmark but occasionally lock up which is why I don't consider the setting as ablsolutely stable and skip the scores.

Sysmark2000 scores at 1 GHz (turquoise) and 1050 MHz (purple).
Top to bottom: overall score (3), Internet Content Creation (2) and Office Productivity (1). At both settings, scores exceed 200 points, once again, the highest ever seen here.

All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws. Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this site.
Copyright 2000 LostCircuits