AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 2: Overclocking

Starting with Overall System Performance, measured by BAPCo's SYSMark 98, the precedence seems to be given to the setups with the higher overall clock speed. The Athlon overclocked to 750MHz with a 250MHz L2 cache (1/3 * 750 = 250MHz) outperforms the Athlon 700 with its 350MHz L2 cache and the Athlon 700 with 233MHz L2 cache outperforms the Athlon 650 with 325MHz L2 cache.

The performance of overclocked Athlons is a very positive sign for owners of slower CPUs whose L2 cache cannot cope with speeds much greater than 300MHz. Imagine purchasing an Athlon 500 that could overclock to 700MHz easily, with the only necessary tweak being that you reduce the L2 cache speed to 233MHz from your original 250MHz. The performance benefit is definitely worth it. But does this trend continue as we explore the individual applications SYSMark 98 uses to derive its score?