PC Upgrade!

I made a few significant modifications to my machine, since the post on AMD 4200+ over-clocking. Most significant is the processor upgrade. I've installed an AMD 5000+ Black Edition (2.6GHZ stock). The unique factor that makes this a "Black Edition" is the unlocked multiplier that allows for easy over-clocking.

I installed the new CPU with Arctic Silver thermal paste and attached it to my existing Hyper TX2 cooler. I booted up and everything was great. I shut-down the system and got ready for over-clocking. I immediately over-clocked the multiplier to x16 at it's stock core speed. Upon boot, the CPU was now running at 3.2GHZ!! This was awesome, since I didn't even have to up the voltage.

With that, I decided to shut-down and try for a little more juice. I cranked the voltage up on the memory and CPU slightly and kept the CPU multiplier at x16. From the stock speed I pushed the CPU speed up a few notches and rebooted. After a few reboots I finally got the CPU speed up to 3.3GHZ which seems to be the brink at which other over-clock test were maxing out at before the system became unstable.

AMD's 5000+ Black Edition is an amazing deal as far as price/performance goes. The CPU was on sale for $88 and it has been an amazing boost to my machine.


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Original Vista Score (AMD 4200+) : CPU score= 5.2 (CPU is the bottleneck) overall 5.2
New Vista Score (AMD 5000+ BE ) : CPU score= 5.5 (HDD is the bottleneck)overall 5.4
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Original 3D Mark Score* : 9,566
New 3D Mark Score* : 10,544
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*average after 3 tests


The real world performance vs. the synthetic game scores is much more significant. Applications load a lot faster (Photoshop opens in mere seconds), the system boots so fast I barely see the Vista loading bar screen,I am able to crank up the settings a little higher on games.

To go along with the CPU upgrade I also added another gig of XMS2 memory after CPU installation was complete. This brings the system to a total of 3GB of RAM at 4-4-4-12-2 timings.

*note that all of these test were run on Vista Business 32-bit with SP1 installed.