So just how good is the Athlon 64. Also just as important, how accurate is the overclocking that we are always reading about? This and more is being covered in this article by Neoseeker. While most of it may be pretty run of the mill, there are likely to be a few surprises in there for you.

Overclocking on the Athlon 64 is more complicated than on other architectures because of the backplane design and the often misunderstood relationship between the LDT and HyperTransport bus. When overclocking, oft-repeated is that “turning down your HT link speed has little effect on performance”, or that “running with a memory divider is for weenies”. As was the question with our Multimeter vs. Motherboard article, I had to ask myself “Has any of this ever been quantified and published?”

The answer, as a matter of fact, is “sort of”. Nonetheless, I wanted to run my own set of tests in a controlled environment, testing the effects of every difference in settings, and publishing the results in one, unified article. Before setting out to run any kind of tests, I planned out exactly what I would test and how I would test it. I settled on the following: [Read the rest]