OC but low 3DMark06 score? (w/ Athlon 5000+ black)

Hi,

Recently I upgraded my computer and figured I would try a little overclocking. I’m fairly new to it, but have read really good things about the trying to overclock the AMD Athlon 5000+ black.

Anyway so after a little research I upped the multiplier to 14.5 (to about 2.9Ghz) and tested everything on Prime95 for about an hour and so fair everything seems good! Very stable and temperature remains low, but when I tested my system using 3dMark06 I found a measly increase from 3245 to 3290!!! Only 45 points??? Should I have expected more??

Also found when I tried upping the multiplier to 15 that the system became unstable and I also found that a serious limitation of my ASUS mobo is that I cannot increase the Vcore any higher then 1.35??? Which seriously limits my overclocking potential! But I was wondering can I/should I try increasing my Mobo’s clock speed as well as Ocing my RAM??? I mean would this help my 3dMark06 score a lot?

Thanx for any help!!!!!

My system:

-AMD A64 X2 5000+ 2.60GHz Black (OC to 2.91Ghz)
-ZEROtherm CPU cooler BTF90
-Asus M2N-SLI
-OCZ Platinum 2048MB PC6400
-EVGA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB GDDR2 RAM
-ULTRA 600W Power Supply
-Hitachi 350GB Harddrive.

thats about it that processor is limited but so is your video card. bare in mind you have only increased 300MHZ! because 3DMark06 still very dependable on GPU rather then CPU. try overclock your GPU im sure you will see bigger gain.

Buy an 8800gt or ATI 4850. This will solve your low 3d mark scores.

E8200 + 8800gt =~ 13500 3d mark06 score.

Your rigs fine, if not a little dated to todays standard, but if your running your games happily I don't see the obvious need to upgrade to just increase your 3dmark scores.

SanDiego was spot on with the overclocking and gfx. You don't want to reach too high in the gfx department unless you intend to upgrade your cpu in the near future.

The Athlon x2 CPU's and gfx combo will get lower scores than Calinkula mentioned with C2D. As a previous 6000+ @3.5ghz owner, you do see lower 3dmark scores, but again if your happy with your rig atm then your laughing. If only i could kick the need for getting more outta my rig...

think is i know how he feels 3dmark makes his pc feel slow lol
but as they said earlier ur gpu is a major limitation a 7600gt is really really dated

u may not need an overkill gpu like a 4850 and a simple 8800 would do great or a 9600gt


do keep in mind despite the brisbanes achieving a higher clock speed than the winsdor cores like the 6000+ clock for clock they are totally inferior with slower L2 mem and to make matters worse they have half the L2 of a 6000+

My experience with ASUS and OCZ memory is ASUS reports the memory settings wrong, I suggest going to the OCZ website, look up your memory settings including the operating voltage, and enter them in the CMOS setup manually>IE; TCL,TRCD,TRP,TRAS, etc. ASUS will also set your DDR2 voltage wrong for OCZ, and some of your voltage settings can only be addressed when the OCing features are set to manual, I'm not familiar with your exact ASUS model M/B, but for you not being able to adjust Vcore is probably because you haven't enabled access to those settings.

Edit Note: After looking up your M/B manual> Enter CMOS setup, Open Advanced Tab, Select Jumperfree Configuration, Set AI Tuning to [Manual], that opens access to Vcore and other settings.

Stay way from half multiplier .5 settings increase in whole number increments, you should be able to run a 15X multi easily on air around the 1.400 or 1.425 Vcore area

Leave memory speed at 200mhz, HT multi at 5, that will keep your HT from exceeding its limitations, thats important when you increase an AMD multiplier past its default setting, leave PCI-E at 100.

One last thing make sure you're flashed to the last available BIOS release for your M/B.

Yeah, your Video Card is your sinker anything from the 8800 nvidia or 3870 ati should suit you better.