Weekly Buyer's Guide: Overclocking System - March 2004

Memory

Recommendation: 2 X 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level One (CAS2)
Price: $214 shipped

While companies like Corsair, OCZ and now Kingston are heavy favorites among enthusiasts and overclockers, Mushkin is also starting to gain favor rapidly. While we haven't raved about Mushkin modules in previous reviews, we've been quietly impressed with their performance, reliability, and price. Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder to find dual packs nowadays; but Mushkin Dual Packs are available at large vendors like Axion and Newegg at any rate, so they're still out there. We've been able to perform lots of testing with these specific PC3500 modules and they indeed run stabily at PC3500 (433MHz DDR) on many currently available motherboards, including the NF7-S Rev.2 and P4C800-E Deluxe. Thankfully, these Level One modules overclock to fairly high levels over its rated DDR433 speed. At a 1:1 memory ratio, these modules are perfect for the 2500+ mobile Barton system that we have recommended, if reasonable memory timings are used. However, you can always use a different FSB:memory ratio that will set your memory to lower frequencies so that you can also achieve low latencies. Either way, the performance at very high memory speeds at high latencies compared to lower memory speeds at low latencies is about the same. We suggest that you experiment with both combinations to see which yields the best performance for the applications you run. If you have any questions, you can always visit our forums for more information. It never hurts to ask questions.

Alternative: 2 X 512MB OCZ PC3700 GOLD Revision 2 (CAS2.5)
Price: $265 shipped

These modules are better suited for your Pentium 4 system because of the higher FSB speeds that you will reach with it compared to an Athlon XP system. Like we said before, the performance difference between low memory latencies/frequencies compared to high memory frequencies/latencies is virtually the same, so it's up to you as to how you want to configure your FSB:memory ratios. Make sure not to give up too much latency though, as ridiculously high DDR speeds are worthless if latency is too high.

Video

Recommendation: 128MB Gigabyte Radeon 9600 Pro, DVI and TV-out
Price: $138 shipped

Gigabyte makes several excellent ATI Radeon cards nowadays. Their stock coolers are bigger and better than most you'll find, at least compared to PowerColor and Sapphire.

Gigabyte sent us their Radeon 9600 Pro quite some time ago and today, we are finally able to do a little testing on it. Performance is on par with other 9600 Pro video cards that we've tested. In fact, it was one of the fastest of the bunch. Overclocking performance with Gigabyte's 9600 Pro is stellar; we were able to achieve 475MHz core clock and 700MHz memory clock speeds using the stock Gigabyte cooler. These speeds were Prime 95 and SPECviewperf 7.1.1 stable, but as we've said before, that only gives you a narrow idea of how stable your system will be over a period of several months. Still, we didn't experience a single issue during our stability testing at 475MHz/700MHz. Remember, the stock speeds for the 9600 Pro are 400MHz/600MHz, so we're talking about quite a large difference in performance when overclocked to 475MHz/700MHz.

In case you're curious, we set VAGP in the BIOS to 1.6V. This is a perfectly safe voltage, even though 1.5V is the default VAGP for modern day motherboards. Nothing higher than 1.6V is necessary though, as it'll yield diminishing returns to the point where it's basically pointless to overvolt any higher. The 475MHz/700MHz overclock was achieved on both the 2500+ ABIT NF7-S Rev.2 system and the 2.8C ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe system, running at 2.52GHz (1.80V) and 3.59GHz (1.65V) respectively.

Alternative: Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro with DVI and TV-out
Price: $210

Sapphire also makes one of the better 9800 Pro video cards out there. Speed and features for the price are excellent ($210), and overclocking performance with the stock cooling is impressive. The best combination of core and memory clock speed that we were able to reach was 415MHz core clock and 780MHz memory clock speeds with just the stock cooling. For the few hours that we tested the 9800 Pro with Prime 95 and SPECviewperf 7.1.1, we were unable to see any IQ issues and didn't discover any instability. Overall, a fantastic performer for the money.

If you feel the need to squeeze out more performance from your video card, we suggest that you replace your stock cooling solution (whether it's the 9600 Pro or 9800 Pro) with an Artic Cooling VGA Silencer. They can be had for $27 shipped online.

Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available from many different reputable vendors on popular memory and video cards:


If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.