The FX-70 and Overclocking

Now that I have my system up and running - I decided to try some overclocking.

I've not really delved into the full capaiblities of the Asus BIOS. I used the "AI Overclock" feauture. To set this up go to: Advanced -> JumperFree Configuration -> AI Overclocking

Set the value to "Overclock Profile".

You'll have a range of about 6 choices 3% to 30%.

I was able to overclock the chip by 15% - leading to a clock speed of 2.98 Ghz! So it would seem that the FX-70 has the ability to run as well as the FX-74. It may be possible to push the system further than this, perhaps to 20%. I might consider this if I get a better cooling solution in place. The cpu temperature seemed to stay at the same values when not overclocked, the CPU fans seemed to be ticked up a few notches though. I'll do some more detailed testing in the future.

So what's the benefit? The overclocking gained me 700 points on the 3dMark 2006 test.

Also, what is interesting about the AI Overclock is that it will OC the entire system, HT, RAM, and CPU so I suspect that the overall performance gain will be higher than just OC'ing the processors.