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Once
in a while we get a product into the lab here at
HotHardware that is just plain fun to work
with. As a result, we like to take our time
with a full review of the product so we have plenty of
time to "live with it" before passing
judgment. We have been working and living
with Asus P4T Motherboard for about a week now and
we have been able to do some pretty interesting
tricks with it while having a lot of fun in the
process. This
is a quick peek into the netherworld of
over-clocking with the Pentium 4. Well
alright, let's not be too dramatic here.
Over-clocking is very commonplace these
days. Many motherboard vendors give end
users the ability to push their PC hardware to the
limit, at their own risk. And why not?
It's your hardware, so giving you the ability to
explore its outer most limits in performance is a
very smart design approach and product feature
from a marketing perspective. Later
this week, we'll be looking at the Asus P4T i850
Pentium 4 Motherboard in greater detail. For
now, here is a quick glimpse at our
"vehicle" for this adventure.
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| HotHardware's
Test System |
| Intel
inside and Asus under the hood |
|
On
the left, the star of our little side show, is the
Asus P4T i850 Motherboard. Just add 256MB of
Dual RAMBUS (Dual 128MB sticks), an nVidia
GeForce2 UItra and ... Why don't we
just post up the system specs here.
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Asus
P4T Motherboard, Pentium 4 Processor @
1.5GHz.,
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256MB
of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,
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IBM
DTLA307045 45Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive,
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nVidia
GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,
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Intel
100tx PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem
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Sound
Blaster Live Sound Card,
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Hitachi
DVD ROM Drive,
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WindowsME
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Direct
X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers version
7.17
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Intel
chipset drivers version 2.60a
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| Installation
/ Setup |
| Over-clocking
is not rocket science... |
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The
Pentium4 is "over-clockable" like any of
its previous older siblings. Get good
cooling, adjust the front side bus, bump up the
voltage if need be and away you go. We used
a stock Intel Heat Sink that came with our
CPU. "Stock" is a relative term
these days with Intel P4 sinks. They are
getting beefier all the time it seems, as clock
speeds increase.
This
is the unit without the shroud and fan assembly
mounted to it, so you can get a good look at the
hardware underneath.
The
other weapon in any "Over-Clocker's"
arsenal is a good BIOS for adjusting CPU
setup. The Asus P4T does a nice job
here. Perhaps it isn't as sophisticated as
some of Asus' more mature P3 motherboards but it
gives you the tools you need regardless.
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Normal
BIOS CPU Setup
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BIOS
Clock Adjustments
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Overclocked
w/ Volt Boost
| You'll
also note that here we set the CPU up on a 13X
Multiplier with a 133MHz. Front Side Bus.
Stock Pentium 4 chips will come with either a 14X
mult. for 1.4GHz. chips or 15X for 1.5GHz.
chips. Our processor is an Intel Engineering
sample with the multiplier unlocked, so we were
free to explore the most top end clock speed we
could achieve, with lots of options. Now
that we have things setup for success here, let's
boot our oh-so friendly OS (extreme sarcasm) and
see what we'll get!
The
P4 hits new heights with the benchmarks!
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