tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-06, 03:59:

supercordo wrote on 2026-05-05, 21:09:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-05, 09:27:

Hmm.. tempts me to grab a K7S8X and just mod it the same way I did back then.. and beyond? Considering...

With only single channel ram and 333mhz fsb, youre going to have to do a lot of modding to compete with all the nForce2 Ultra 400 boards.

Because a challenge isn't a challenge if you'd use the easiest path. My K7S8X would do 200MHz FSB and more back in the day, though not officially supported. And yes, single channel sucks, but for me it's a throwback to my youth.

I'd have an A7N8X as well, but I don't want to.. Well.. Risk it 😀

A7N8X-X does single channel if you wanna try. I've got one and found out it's single channel if the RAM slots are black. I unfortunately won't be able to participate into this competition (the A7N8X-X isn't worth it for me, my KG7-RAID doesn't want to OC for beans despite being known to be an OC-ers board, and I don't have any other boards that can qualify in any of the other "Aiming for the stars" threads) but at least hope I could be of help.

PcBytes wrote on 2026-05-10, 19:21:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-06, 03:59:

supercordo wrote on 2026-05-05, 21:09:

With only single channel ram and 333mhz fsb, youre going to have to do a lot of modding to compete with all the nForce2 Ultra 400 boards.

Because a challenge isn't a challenge if you'd use the easiest path. My K7S8X would do 200MHz FSB and more back in the day, though not officially supported. And yes, single channel sucks, but for me it's a throwback to my youth.

I'd have an A7N8X as well, but I don't want to.. Well.. Risk it 😀

A7N8X-X does single channel if you wanna try. I've got one and found out it's single channel if the RAM slots are black. I unfortunately won't be able to participate into this competition (the A7N8X-X isn't worth it for me, my KG7-RAID doesn't want to OC for beans despite being known to be an OC-ers board, and I don't have any other boards that can qualify in any of the other "Aiming for the stars" threads) but at least hope I could be of help.

Mine does dual channel. I'm already on my way to build up the K7S8X to my desire.

PcBytes wrote on 2026-05-10, 19:21:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-06, 03:59:

supercordo wrote on 2026-05-05, 21:09:

With only single channel ram and 333mhz fsb, youre going to have to do a lot of modding to compete with all the nForce2 Ultra 400 boards.

Because a challenge isn't a challenge if you'd use the easiest path. My K7S8X would do 200MHz FSB and more back in the day, though not officially supported. And yes, single channel sucks, but for me it's a throwback to my youth.

I'd have an A7N8X as well, but I don't want to.. Well.. Risk it 😀

A7N8X-X does single channel if you wanna try. I've got one and found out it's single channel if the RAM slots are black. I unfortunately won't be able to participate into this competition (the A7N8X-X isn't worth it for me, my KG7-RAID doesn't want to OC for beans despite being known to be an OC-ers board, and I don't have any other boards that can qualify in any of the other "Aiming for the stars" threads) but at least hope I could be of help.

Actually scratch that, I might still have an ace up my sleeve. Do we have an "Aiming for the stars" for Tualatin?

PcBytes wrote on 2026-05-11, 10:11:

PcBytes wrote on 2026-05-10, 19:21:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-06, 03:59:

Because a challenge isn't a challenge if you'd use the easiest path. My K7S8X would do 200MHz FSB and more back in the day, though not officially supported. And yes, single channel sucks, but for me it's a throwback to my youth.

I'd have an A7N8X as well, but I don't want to.. Well.. Risk it 😀

A7N8X-X does single channel if you wanna try. I've got one and found out it's single channel if the RAM slots are black. I unfortunately won't be able to participate into this competition (the A7N8X-X isn't worth it for me, my KG7-RAID doesn't want to OC for beans despite being known to be an OC-ers board, and I don't have any other boards that can qualify in any of the other "Aiming for the stars" threads) but at least hope I could be of help.

Actually scratch that, I might still have an ace up my sleeve. Do we have an "Aiming for the stars" for Tualatin?

Not Yet but we will later im sure. You can start one if you want.

supercordo wrote on 2026-05-07, 16:33:

RetroAddict wrote on 2026-05-07, 15:48:

The xp-m were fantastic chips. Sadly I only have a 3200 and below but I will give this a go 👍. Also have a p4 extreme, wonder which is faster? I can’t mess with the p4 unfortunately as it’s up for sale

Check out the netburst aiming for the stars thread. The P4 extreme was a reponce to the Athlon 64 fx.

I just sold the board and cpu that I had with a P4 EE cpu in it, so I can't do that one!

RetroAddict wrote on 2026-05-13, 23:32:

supercordo wrote on 2026-05-07, 16:33:

RetroAddict wrote on 2026-05-07, 15:48:

The xp-m were fantastic chips. Sadly I only have a 3200 and below but I will give this a go 👍. Also have a p4 extreme, wonder which is faster? I can’t mess with the p4 unfortunately as it’s up for sale

Check out the netburst aiming for the stars thread. The P4 extreme was a reponce to the Athlon 64 fx.

I just sold the board and cpu that I had with a P4 EE cpu in it, so I can't do that one!

We dont sell stuf, we just collect it.

Recapped the A7N8X Deluxe, installed the Uber 1007D bios, obtained an unlocked Barton (only a 2500+ at the moment, but I should have a 3000 on the way). First run is as below, still got some work to do to find the highest stable overclock on the mainboard/CPU, the GPU is about as far as it will push without starting to artifact. Also got some work to do to find the best video driver. Not a bad start though.

And a few tweaks:

Hmm... let me fire up my Athlon 1333/KG7-RAID and see what I can do. I got my Tually on the ST6 up to 186FSB/1.6GHz (from 1133MHz base) and would love to see if the 2GB worth of ECC DDR on the KG7 withstands OC.

And here be my results. Athlon 1333, ABIT KG7-RAID mobo, and a whoopin' 2GB worth of ECC Samsung DDR-266 RAM.

Highest I could get. Anything past 1.5GHz doesn't complete it, or outright crashes within seconds of arriving at desktop. Oh, and I had to resort to using a USB WLAN dongle to get on the internetz to gather 3DM01SE. LAN cards of any kind just REFUSED to play nice.

Thank god I had found OPPainter's settings from a post I had in the "Bought these (retro) hardware today". GPU is at stock clocks as I don't really have much experience in GPU overclocks.

And yes, I'm aware I'm dumping Orion/Pluto levels of voltage in that poor lil' T-Bird 🤣

Starting to think we should split the leaderboards into chip type like we did for the P4 thread. Could be tempted to dig out my Tbird 1.4 and give it a whirl.

paradigital wrote on 2026-05-16, 18:45:

Starting to think we should split the leaderboards into chip type like we did for the P4 thread. Could be tempted to dig out my Tbird 1.4 and give it a whirl.

I assume it hasn't been split yet since last 2 results in here were both Bartons. Probably supercordo will update the scores, and then split them into chip core type once more results from other cores come in.

paradigital wrote on 2026-05-16, 11:34:

And a few tweaks:

The attachment 21926-A7N8X-233x9.5-7900GS-93.71.png is no longer available

Looks most practical to me, without crazy CPU overclock. Could use 1GB RAM though. I found memory stability testing to be tough, I had to use memtest86, prime95, superpi, occt, 3d mark 2000 in a loop. 3 of them working for many hours was not a sufficient proof of stability.

Interestingly, s754 Athlon 64@2.2Ghz 1MB L2 gets a very similar score with Radeon X1950 Pro which is slower by at least 30%. All those tested Bartons are vastly underpowered for Radeon HD 3850. Still, it makes the most powerful Athlon XP system. There can be games that benefit from such overpowered GPU though, I have seen it in Radeon X1950 Pro vs GTX 275.

It could be interesting to run a few more benchmarks on that system, similarly how nd22 did it in Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754!. 3d mark 2003, doom 3, far cry should be sufficient. It would demonstrate to users having GeForce 7600GT or 7800GS how much are they missing.

AlexZ wrote on 2026-05-16, 22:35:

Looks most practical to me, without crazy CPU overclock. Could use 1GB RAM though. I found memory stability testing to be tough, […]
Show full quote

paradigital wrote on 2026-05-16, 11:34:

And a few tweaks:

The attachment 21926-A7N8X-233x9.5-7900GS-93.71.png is no longer available

Looks most practical to me, without crazy CPU overclock. Could use 1GB RAM though. I found memory stability testing to be tough, I had to use memtest86, prime95, superpi, occt, 3d mark 2000 in a loop. 3 of them working for many hours was not a sufficient proof of stability.

Interestingly, s754 Athlon 64@2.2Ghz 1MB L2 gets a very similar score with Radeon X1950 Pro which is slower by at least 30%. All those tested Bartons are vastly underpowered for Radeon HD 3850. Still, it makes the most powerful Athlon XP system. There can be games that benefit from such overpowered GPU though, I have seen it in Radeon X1950 Pro vs GTX 275.

It could be interesting to run a few more benchmarks on that system, similarly how nd22 did it in Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754!. 3d mark 2003, doom 3, far cry should be sufficient. It would demonstrate to users having GeForce 7600GT or 7800GS how much are they missing.

I could increase the RAM but I’d have to switch out from my PC3700 set that is happy to run at tighter timings at the 233FSB I’m at, so I’d probably lose a bit of performance by increasing available RAM. Currently my RAM isn’t technically overclocked at all.

I’ve got an X1950PRO AGP somewhere, which I could test in place of the 7900GS, I wanted to run my X1950XT AGP, but it appears that it’s dead 🙁

3Dm03 and Farcry are installed on this system already so they would be trivial to benchmark, I don’t own a copy of Doom 3 though, but Quake 4 is already installed on the system, and both are id Tech 4 engine games, so it might be a worthwhile stand-in.

From general day-to-day usability this system feels quite well balanced, I’m still CPU bottlenecked though, the 7900GS has a bit more to give I think.

Run 3d mark 2003, Farcry and Quake 4 benchmarks then, have a look at the thread Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754! for settings. Quake 4 will probably suffer from small RAM size.

I tend to use overpowered GPUs rather than trying to max out a GPU with the best CPU. I did a comparison in nd22's thread Re: Battle of the platforms: socket 754! and the difference between Radeon X1950 PRO and GTX 275 is massive, despite the CPU being very similar. It does pay off. The same effect should exist in Socket A. GeFoce 7900GS, Radeon X1950 Pro, Radeon HD3850 are all great choices to max it out.

So, this system is still odd. Just tried a run at 10x233 rather than 9.5x233 and the 3dmark2001 performance in “Nature” halved.

PCmark shows an increase in CPU performance for 10x 233 vs 9.5x233 so it’s not like the CPU was performing worse, but for some reason graphics performance dropped off a cliff.

If it is reproducible then you are probably getting silent failures and retries somewhere. I would try reducing FSB a bit.

AlexZ wrote on 2026-05-17, 09:07:

If it is reproducible then you are probably getting silent failures and retries somewhere. I would try reducing FSB a bit.

It seems to have been a one-off for that particular issue. Changed the multiplier down by 0.5 and back up and the speed was back to expected. Not stable though.

Dropped the FSB down from 233 to 225 and upped the multi from 9.5 to 10.5 for a clock of 2.366GHz on the CPU, which I think is as far as it can go.

Not quite enough to take #1 from Supercordo though, 99.4% of the score though, I'll call that "margin of error" 😜

Nice. Sometimes re-running a few times and rebooting can give a higher result, unless you already did that. Athlon XP should work at 2.4Ghz. More is luck, less bad luck.

When OCing things can be weird at particular frequencies. For example on my Turion 64, Command Rate 1T is stable at 2.4Ghz, but not at 2.2Ghz (stock). Stabilizing it required mixing Kingston and OCZ memory sticks, 2 Kingston wouldn't do it. I have never seen anything like it before. So sometimes it pays off to just change frequency a bit or mix sticks.

Nice benchmarks guys!! Ill update scores tomorrow. Trying to enjoy the rest of the weekend. Ill add the different cores to the score board.