The ASUS K8N-E Deluxe Socket 754 Motherboard

The HotHardware Test Bed Athlon 64 Power

Overclocking Squeezing it for Everything We Can Get

Before we get started with the benchmarking segment, let's take a moment to see how the K8N-E overclocked.  With a working multiplier register and memory divider, we had high hopes for this board.  Typically, we've only teetered on getting our Athlon 3200+ up to 2.2GHz at most, with a bus set for 220.  In the end, our experience was pretty good, although we still ended up running the processor at 2.2GHz.  By adjusting the multiplier setting to 9.5X, we reached a peak bus of 232MHz, which resulted on the processor running at 2.2GHz.  Our DDR memory had to be configured to run at 333MHz which resulted in it running at 400MHz DDR when running the bus at 232MHz.  So the biggest gain was the CPU at 2.2GHz, a modest increase of 10%.  We then ran a quick round of our custom UT2004 Demo and managed to increase the performance from 107FPS to 116FPS. This resulted in a real world boost of 8.5% overall.

SiSoftware's SANDRA 2004 Let's Start with the Synthetics

To get a quick assessment of expected system performance, we like to run three common modules included in SANDRA 2004: CPU, Multimedia and Memory.  Below we ran each test twice, once at stock speeds and then while overclocked.

Our test bed compared nicely to the reference systems in SANDRA's internal database, only falling to the 3.2GHz P4.  Memory performance was where the board really shined, taking the top spot.  Once we overclocked the system, the picture changed a bit.  The CPU and Multimedia tests excelled, but the memory scores were slower simply by the process of overclocking as we covered earlier.  Overall, though, the system boost was respectable.

Next, we'll shift our focus to our collection of benchmarks to assess the K8N-E's performance in a wide variety of tasks.  We've also included results from a VIA K8T800 Pro board to give a frame of reference for the results.