Gigabyte® GA-8I945P Dual Graphic-R Review-World's First SLI on i945 Chipset?

VII. Overclocking

In overclocking, I decided to try two processors. This is to check how far I can push the FSB of lower speed processor, and how far I can push the frequency of higher clocked processor. For this exercise, I use Intel® Pentium® D 920, and Intel® Pentium® D 950 processors. I manage to hit a stable 275FSB on the Intel® Pentium® D 920 processor.

The other processor, the Intel® Pentium® D 950 have reached better "clockage", giving me a very stable 252FSB for a solid 4.3Ghz. One thing I noticed with this motherboard is that it gives a very very large droop in vCore during full load, whether on stock or overclocked settings. This may be the reason why I hit better clock frequency on motherboards based on i975 chipset than this one. But at this speed, I am not complaining, I just hope Gigabyte will improve their VRM on their future motherboards.

Stock versus Overclock-3DMark

The graph below shows the comparative performance between stock and overclocked settings. The overclock performance really makes both the processor flex its muscles where it is needed. As can be seen on 3DMark06 CPU score, there's a massive performance boost in this area because of the clock frequency.

Stock versus Overclock-PCMark

With PCMark, the performance improvement is even more apparent. Unlike with 3DMark where video performance is being stress tested, PCMark provides a better view of overall system performance. PCMark02 isn't really geared for multi-tasking and multi-threading, and influenced heavily by clock speed rather than number of core. On the other hand, PCMark04 and PCMark05 are more geared towards multi-threading and parralelism of applications, and shows the power of overclocked dual core computing.