When we overclock the Athlon we boosted core voltage towards 1.7 volts and gave the processor a multiplier of 12.5x (12.5x133=1663 MHz), we did this in about 15 seconds. Overclocking really is that easy. So now we have 'transformed' the Athlon XP 1800+ into a 2000+ and it behaved absolutely stable. Increasing the FSB at this stage made it instable. But hey .. we overclocked the CPU really far already. Better results could only be achieved if we'd use another cooling method like water-cooling. In fact .. Project 'G' which I'm working on will demonstrate that with this setup ;) More on that in a later article though.

Since we now have an Athlon XP 2000+ in our system for free let's redo the benchmarks and see how it behaves performance wise. Again, the platform used was Windows 2000 Pro.

As you can see after overclocking the BIOS and windows reports the processor clearly as Athlon XP 2000+ processor.

Performance wise the CPU is now exactly where it should be. 100% stability here and a definite gain over normal 1800+ performance.

The numbers are just fine. The number would be way higher is we could increase the FSB or actually have full DDR400 support as you can see changing the multiplier does not have an effect on memory performance at all. Therefore best performance is always obtained in overclocking the FSB. Let's do just that.