Investigations into Socket 939 Athlon 64 Overclocking

Half-Life 2 Performance

Just as Doom 3 favors NVIDIA performance, Half-Life 2 has done better on ATI cards. Our X800 Pro should provide more than playable results at all the tested resolutions, as HL2 really depends on GPU fillrate for performance. HL2 is also somewhat more CPU limited than other titles, which should give some good performance scaling with our overclocks. Future Source engine games making use of HDR will probably move the bottleneck back towards the GPU, judging by what we've seen in other HDR-enabled titles. Hopefully, Source can manage to provide more realistic HDR modes without cutting performance in half, but we're doubtful.

As with Far Cry, we benchmarked several levels and averaged the results; in this case, we used Anand's C17_12, Canals_08, Coast_05, Coast_12, and Prison_05 demos. Unfortunately, this may be the last time that we use those benchmarks, as the recent Steam upgrade has broken compatibility with revision 7 demos. All of these benchmarks were completed prior to the 9/23 update, luckily, but future overclocking articles will use different demos and will thus not be directly comparable with these scores. For the 22 graphs of the individual levels, we've once again created a Zip file.

HL2 gains 41%, 39%, and 33% from overclocking as we increase the resolution. Also of interest is that even with 4xAA enabled, HL2 gains 40%, 37%, and 26% at the same tested resolutions. As we mentioned, HL2 is far more dependent on GPU fillrate than GPU memory bandwidth. At 1024x768 4xAA, the 2600 and 2700 configurations deliver basically equal performance, but all of the lower resolutions still show some increase with CPU clock speed.

In our biggest margin of victory, the OCZ RAM averages a 9% advantage over the value RAM. That's about the equivalent of a CPU upgrade (assuming that you don't overclock), at about the same cost as upgrading the processor. Like Far Cry, the 2T timing hurts performance. One of the things that you might have noticed is that the 10x280 setting has trailed behind the 2700 MHz configurations in most of the games. If we could get it running stably with 1T command rate, it would be better, but we were unable to accomplish this. The value RAM wouldn't even post at 10x280, so whatever limits that we're running into are at least lessened with higher quality RAM.