plongstaff
Solid State Member
- Messages
- 6
I've discovered a bit of curious performance problem with my machine. It's about 2 years old and has never really been overclocked until lately. Before I go into detail, here are the specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800
4GB OCZ Platinum DDR-PC3200
Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
ATI HD 3870 512MB
150GB WD Raptor 10,000rpm
SB Audigy 2 ZS Gamer
Windows XP SP2 32bit
Since the day I built the machine I always felt like it was under performing, but it did decent enough in the games I was playing at the time to not pursue the problem much further then ensuring all drivers and such were up to date.
However, I have a new machine now and have recently been playing with some overclocks on the machine listed above and ran into a very curious issue. I overclocked the machine to 2.3GHz, which is not a huge OC for this chip. Had no problems, handled the OC just fine and was in my 9th hour of Prime95 testing. I got home from work and started up Crysis, to my surprise I was getting phenominally better FPS then I expected. I used to get 20-30 on medium settings and was now getting 45-55fps.
First thing that came to mind is that the overclock cannot be solely responsible for that type of improvement, so I flipped back to windows and noticed the 2 Prime95's were still running....now my curiosity was really peeked as I would have expected hindered performance with them running. I shut them both down and went back to Crysis and my fps was right back to what I expected 20-30....
To further test this I put my machine back to its normal clockrate and settings and tested again with near identical results. I went on and tested this with some other games (AoC Beta, CS:Source, & Gears of War). Each time I was getting much much better fps with the Prime95's running.
Obviously this shows my initial thoughts were right, the machine has been under performing since the start. I'm dumbfounded as to why though. I don't want to be running Prime95 whenever I run games:laughing:, and would like to get my this machine running like that naturally.
Any ideas on what might be the issue? Or ideas on why Prime95 would have this kind of effect?
TIA
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800
4GB OCZ Platinum DDR-PC3200
Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI
ATI HD 3870 512MB
150GB WD Raptor 10,000rpm
SB Audigy 2 ZS Gamer
Windows XP SP2 32bit
Since the day I built the machine I always felt like it was under performing, but it did decent enough in the games I was playing at the time to not pursue the problem much further then ensuring all drivers and such were up to date.
However, I have a new machine now and have recently been playing with some overclocks on the machine listed above and ran into a very curious issue. I overclocked the machine to 2.3GHz, which is not a huge OC for this chip. Had no problems, handled the OC just fine and was in my 9th hour of Prime95 testing. I got home from work and started up Crysis, to my surprise I was getting phenominally better FPS then I expected. I used to get 20-30 on medium settings and was now getting 45-55fps.
First thing that came to mind is that the overclock cannot be solely responsible for that type of improvement, so I flipped back to windows and noticed the 2 Prime95's were still running....now my curiosity was really peeked as I would have expected hindered performance with them running. I shut them both down and went back to Crysis and my fps was right back to what I expected 20-30....
To further test this I put my machine back to its normal clockrate and settings and tested again with near identical results. I went on and tested this with some other games (AoC Beta, CS:Source, & Gears of War). Each time I was getting much much better fps with the Prime95's running.
Obviously this shows my initial thoughts were right, the machine has been under performing since the start. I'm dumbfounded as to why though. I don't want to be running Prime95 whenever I run games:laughing:, and would like to get my this machine running like that naturally.
Any ideas on what might be the issue? Or ideas on why Prime95 would have this kind of effect?
TIA
