Investigations into Athlon X2 Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on December 21, 2005 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Benchmark Information
System components aren't the only changes that we've made. We eventually discovered an error in our Battlefield 2 benchmark last time and removed the scores. The problem was that frame rates were tracked while in the menu screen, skewing the results. We've corrected the benchmark and will provide complete results this time, and we also switched to version 1.03 of BF2 rather than using 1.00. (We'll be switching again to a new demo and version 1.12 soon. Wouldn't it be nice if game updates didn't break old demos?) In addition, Quake 4 and FEAR are now part of the game list. Quake 4 and Doom 3 are very similar, though we did notice that Quake 4 timedemo benchmarks actually disable some of the extra graphical effects (like some of the shadows and lighting).
Here's the list of all the benchmarks that were run, along with information on how they were run:
Please pay attention to the scales used on the graphs. The numbers are also included for reference, and in order to avoid having all of the results overlap, the charts for the most part do not start at the 0 point. This was not done to obfuscate the results, but rather to make the charts less cluttered. A steep line slope will not indicate a significantly faster score in most cases.
Battlefield 2 Benchmark Utility
We received some requests for our BF2 benchmark utility, and since I created it, I'm going to provide it for download here. First, a quick disclaimer: Battlefield 2 benchmarking is a little odd. The built-in benchmark feature runs the demo and pops up a modal dialog at the end with the results - except that you can't see the results because BF2 is still running fullscreen. Pressing space will clear the dialog and allow the game to exit, at which time you can open the results file. The problem is that the results file shows the average frame rate skewed by the menu - the menu will often render at hundreds of frames per second! The timedemo_frametimes.csv file contains the time used for every frame rendered, though, and we know the exact number of frames in our demo file: 6362. By only using the time required to render the last 6362 frames from the CSV, we can calculate the real FPS.
The benchmark takes care of all of this for you, but it's still beta software. Sometimes BF2 will crash and the script will get stuck in a loop; in which case, you'll have to close the command prompt window (or press CTRL+C). Also, some editing of the batch file will generally be required in order to customize the options. Specifically you should set the resolutions that you want to test as well as the drive and directory where BF2 is installed. Don't select resolutions that your monitor can't support - BF2 will simply exit and the script will be stuck in a loop. SLI support also appears to be questionable, at least with the tested versions of NVIDIA's drivers and BF2 1.03.
With the disclaimers done, here's the benchmark tool - including the bf2demo and bf2cam files. Extract it to your C: drive (C:\BF2Bench) and it should work with only a few edits. If you want to extract it elsewhere, you will need to edit the batch file a bit more, but it should still work. Included are freeware versions of a few helper utilities that are required for the script to work. Sleep.exe is used to wait (without using CPU resources) for the benchmark to complete. Gawk.exe is used to calculate the actual FPS for the demo, as well as the amount of time required to load the level. (If you haven't heard of GAWK or AWK before, it is an interpreted programming language of sorts that specializes in the parsing of data files and the generating or reports.)
The repeated calls to sleep.exe may affect BF2 performance slightly (more or less depending on numerous factors), so scores should only be compared with results obtained in the same manner. Suggestions for change and comments are, of course, welcome. You may also edit and/or redistribute the script, provided that my name as well as AnandTech is not removed. If you wish to compare scores with our current and previous results, you must test with BF2 version 1.03. I have also created a new version of the script (and a new demo recording) for BF2 1.12, but results in this article are from the old version. The latest patch also made benchmarking a bit easier, so the new script doesn't have to be as complex. It still has to calculate manually the frames per second in order to avoid the impact of rendering the menu screens, and the new demo file is 8336 frames long. Enjoy!
System components aren't the only changes that we've made. We eventually discovered an error in our Battlefield 2 benchmark last time and removed the scores. The problem was that frame rates were tracked while in the menu screen, skewing the results. We've corrected the benchmark and will provide complete results this time, and we also switched to version 1.03 of BF2 rather than using 1.00. (We'll be switching again to a new demo and version 1.12 soon. Wouldn't it be nice if game updates didn't break old demos?) In addition, Quake 4 and FEAR are now part of the game list. Quake 4 and Doom 3 are very similar, though we did notice that Quake 4 timedemo benchmarks actually disable some of the extra graphical effects (like some of the shadows and lighting).
Here's the list of all the benchmarks that were run, along with information on how they were run:
| Benchmark Information | |
| Winstones 2004 (v1.01) | Default settings except reboots between benchmark runs were disabled. |
| PCMark04/05 | Default settings. |
| AutoGK 1.96 | Encode Ch. 9 of The Sum of All Fears to 75% quality Encode a 30 second commercial to 5MB size with audio DivX version 5.2.1 and Xvid version 1.0.3 |
| Battlefield 2 (v1.03) | High detail setting with lighting set to High as well. |
| Doom 3 (v1.03) | High detail setting. |
| Quake 4 (v1.00) | High detail setting. |
| Far Cry (v1.33) | Very High setting with 8xAF. |
| Half-Life 2 | All settings at High plus Reflect World and 8xAF. |
| F.E.A.R. (v1.01) | High detail setting with 8xAF and no soft shadows. |
| 3DMark03/05 | Default settings. |
| CPU-Z (v1.30) Latency.exe | CPU cycles using 512 byte stride size with 32M data set. |
Please pay attention to the scales used on the graphs. The numbers are also included for reference, and in order to avoid having all of the results overlap, the charts for the most part do not start at the 0 point. This was not done to obfuscate the results, but rather to make the charts less cluttered. A steep line slope will not indicate a significantly faster score in most cases.
Battlefield 2 Benchmark Utility
We received some requests for our BF2 benchmark utility, and since I created it, I'm going to provide it for download here. First, a quick disclaimer: Battlefield 2 benchmarking is a little odd. The built-in benchmark feature runs the demo and pops up a modal dialog at the end with the results - except that you can't see the results because BF2 is still running fullscreen. Pressing space will clear the dialog and allow the game to exit, at which time you can open the results file. The problem is that the results file shows the average frame rate skewed by the menu - the menu will often render at hundreds of frames per second! The timedemo_frametimes.csv file contains the time used for every frame rendered, though, and we know the exact number of frames in our demo file: 6362. By only using the time required to render the last 6362 frames from the CSV, we can calculate the real FPS.
The benchmark takes care of all of this for you, but it's still beta software. Sometimes BF2 will crash and the script will get stuck in a loop; in which case, you'll have to close the command prompt window (or press CTRL+C). Also, some editing of the batch file will generally be required in order to customize the options. Specifically you should set the resolutions that you want to test as well as the drive and directory where BF2 is installed. Don't select resolutions that your monitor can't support - BF2 will simply exit and the script will be stuck in a loop. SLI support also appears to be questionable, at least with the tested versions of NVIDIA's drivers and BF2 1.03.
With the disclaimers done, here's the benchmark tool - including the bf2demo and bf2cam files. Extract it to your C: drive (C:\BF2Bench) and it should work with only a few edits. If you want to extract it elsewhere, you will need to edit the batch file a bit more, but it should still work. Included are freeware versions of a few helper utilities that are required for the script to work. Sleep.exe is used to wait (without using CPU resources) for the benchmark to complete. Gawk.exe is used to calculate the actual FPS for the demo, as well as the amount of time required to load the level. (If you haven't heard of GAWK or AWK before, it is an interpreted programming language of sorts that specializes in the parsing of data files and the generating or reports.)
The repeated calls to sleep.exe may affect BF2 performance slightly (more or less depending on numerous factors), so scores should only be compared with results obtained in the same manner. Suggestions for change and comments are, of course, welcome. You may also edit and/or redistribute the script, provided that my name as well as AnandTech is not removed. If you wish to compare scores with our current and previous results, you must test with BF2 version 1.03. I have also created a new version of the script (and a new demo recording) for BF2 1.12, but results in this article are from the old version. The latest patch also made benchmarking a bit easier, so the new script doesn't have to be as complex. It still has to calculate manually the frames per second in order to avoid the impact of rendering the menu screens, and the new demo file is 8336 frames long. Enjoy!
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Ugh - at a comment on is an article that true special attention to the fact that the graphs aren't zeroed. I think in the process of tweaking article to get things to look right, I accidentally deleted that paragraph. I have now http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">added to paragraph back in.If I start all the graphs at zero, everything overlaps and you can't really see what's going on. In some cases, everything is still overlapped a lot (FEAR). I normally hate nonzero graphs, but when the results are all so close together, that's no good either for readability.
BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Well, if everything is overlapping that much, it's likely that the results are too close to be really meaningful. The FEAR graph is a pretty good example of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/>Ho...">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/"... to Lie With Statistics</a> ;)BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
^ Still need my edit function for comments. :pDammit
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
:)JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
^ Still need my edit function for comments. :pThat was supposed to say, "I had a comment in this article that drew special...." That will teach me to trust my speech recognition software.
Hacp - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
I have found that past 2.6, the heat and temps increase dramatically. Nice to know that anandtech got the same results as well.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
SuperPI crashes help! I have a Opteron 165 with 1 gig of value PC4000 kingmax ram at 133 2.5-4-4-8 2t. Board is OC to 1.4v at 9x277 = 2.494. I have run two torture versions of prime 95 (one of the CPU intensive, one of the ram intensive) on each processor, for a total of 4 prime95's. At the same time I run 3dmark 2005. At the same time I run winamp with visualizations on. I leave this on all night 9hrs+ in a loop. No errors at all. No buggyness at all. I game for 3 or 4 hours at a time and no problems.But I just read this article and SuperPI was mentioned and I never used that before and I tried it. It wouldn't work unless I lowered my overclock to 2.00 which is unacceptable to my sorry ass. I KNOW my system is unstable. I just was wondering if it mattered as the computer is completely stable. I am guessing that prime95 just rounds off answers and they don't have to be exact whereas I am guessing that SuperPI's answers are already known to be exact. Actually SuperPI runs fine but if I open up a second copy from a second folder and attach the affinity to both processors SuperPI will have errors as soon as I start it 1second of starting the 2nd process. Any ideas??
Could it possibly be my motherboard or ram as both are 'value' versions not OC specialty items. I have already played around with rendering divx movies and playing doom no problem. Will I probably have some problem down the road or like some small encoding error or dvd writing error that is due to my overclock. I Overclocked my old PII too high and it was spewing out bad math. I did all these chem reports in college and was getting completly off the wall numbers (I never tested my PII oc in prim95). Is this the same or does the error correcting in my programs that I am running in XP make this point moot.
Man I wish I never read about superPI poo :<
Furen - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Superpi and prime95 work differently. I think superPI is more reliant on memory bandwidth (if you're doing something like 32M superPi) so your ram may be the problem (I, personally, like crucial ram, I've never had any problems with it at all, and its not much more expensive than the generic crap). If your system doesnt crash when you're doing whatever it is that you do on your computer then you're fine, though, but I'd still try to work on the ram to see if you can get it to be superpi stable.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
It just gets wierder and wierder... If I don't set the affinity manually in the task manager it will run through to the end and the CPU's will both be at 100%. But if I set them manually in the task manager before I start 32M the second one I start always crashes? I am guessing that the task manager isn't running the processors at 100% or something, as the windows task manager is automatically putting the loads on the two cpus and for a milisecond one isn't doing anything???? My Memory is up to 95% utilization... This proggie sucks if you ask me.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Thanks for the feedback. BTW it is Kingmax Super Ram, Dual channel mate. My motherboard is a ASRock 939 dual sata-2. Bought it because it runs AGP and PCIe quickly. I have my ram underclocked normally it can run at 200 but is running at 133 normally, I also lowered it to 100. I lowered all the timings lower than what the spd says. None of these things help... I am really confused. I run the Blend (ram intensive) test on each processor at the same time as the FFT test in prime 95. Memory usage goes up to 1.5 gigs total (I only have a gig), so that is using all the memory + page. But there is no error at all. I am a little dumbfounded but I have been thinking about it and my computer doesn't have any 'random' errors which is fine. Cept for firefox 1.5 and it had the same occasional problems before my upgrade. Oh well hope everything stays stable. Thanks for the feedback.