Without using the word obsolete, we as PC Enthusiasts and Gamers know that "What IS" today is surely going to be "What Was" tomorrow. The Art of Overclocking is just one of the ways that we extend the life and power of our systems. AMD Athlon XP processors are my personal favorite due to the ability to overcome Locked Multiplier Syndrome. Memory that can operate at high bus speeds while under aggressive timings ensures the highest degree of performance possible under rock solid stability. Because the timing of the memory matters just as much as speed at which its running, testing the field at all levels is very important.

     Here we see the end result of a Mad Onion 3D Mark 2001(SE) run. The benchmark was run at 1280x1024x32-bit color.  The test was conducted on the AMD XP2200+ running at 1.8GHz with a 133FSB and utilizing PC2100 memory. The motherboard is a MSI KT3-Ultra/ARU and the video card is a Gainward GeForce3. This represents the stock system and gives us the baseline to which we will compare our performance increases as we make adjustments. The purpose of this comparison is to show the connection between a solid system overclock, and the RAM backbone which supports it.

     The Corsair XMS 3200C2 module was installed and the processor set to a speed 2GHz using a 166MHZ memory bus. The CAS, Precharge and RAS-CAS timings were all set at 2T at the 1T timing enabled in the BIOS. First run will be a SiSoft Sandra Memory benchmark.

     The Sandra bench really shows the capabilities of the memory. Compared against other like systems, the Corsair XMS coupled with the KT-333 chipset KT-3 Ultra motherboard, does not quite reach PC-3200 specifications. Which is fine because at this point we're only running at 166MHZ! But look at the PC-2700 reference system also on a KT-333 system two lines below the test system. That ladies and gentleman is a STOMP! Each score (Integer and Floating point) were both beaten by over 300 points.

     Using 3D Mark we are able to more readily identify with the enhancements that the CPU overclock and the strong memory back-bone has given to our XP2200+ The same benchmark settings were used and we get an increase in 1007 points. The Game-4 Nature test is very much like the 'turn your head and cough' to the Video Card / CPU / Memory triad. It is a very intensive test and has been my experience that if a system is going to choke, it will be on this test.