On 8 Jul 2005 14:58:55 -0700, "P Collins"
<nonexistent2032@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>Hi Kony.
>
>I'm using some Artic Silver putty on the CPU. I think my room temp can
>be part of the problem, because in summer it gets up to mid-20's
>Celcius.

Not a problem, that would still mean CPU is at 50C over
ambient temp. The issue would then seem to be case flow or
heatsink adequacy itself.



>The only fans in my case are:
>
>1 fan on the Abit NF7 motherboard.
>1 fan on the CPU itself.
>1 fan on my Radeon 9800 Pro.
>1 fan sucking air from inside into the Antec Truepower 350W PSU.
>1 fan blowing air out from the Antec PSU.
>
>So really, the only fans blowing out from my case is my PSU fan. All
>the other fans blow around inside.

As per AMD recommendations, and further needed by use of a
higher powered video card, you should have a case rear
exhaust fan below the power supply, on rear case wall, and
plenty of unobstructed front-bottom case intake area.



>
>As for why I think my system is underperforming:
>Test system: AMD XP 2500+ Barton 333MHz FSB, 2x512MB DDR333 RAM, Abit
>NF7 motherboard.
>
>My overall CPU Bench 2003 score: 5675
>Score of a Intel P4A 2.4GHz CPU: 5758 (note my CPU is supposed to be
>equivalent to 2500+)
>Score of an AMD Athlon XP 2400+: 5861 (my CPU should beat this!)
>Score of an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (266MHz FSB): 6146
>
>The results are the stored results in CPU Bench 2003, I don't know if
>the processors there are overclocked. Doubtful, or the XP 2600+ would
>beat my 2500+ by a very long shot.

Your score is close enough.
Some users may've shut down all background processes & apps.
Did you?

They may have high-end 2,2,2,5 memory, do you?
How about dual-channel memory?
They may have tweaked and fiddled with several bios settings
or other parameters of their system- and we dont' even know
if their system is as stable as you express need for yours
to be.

Frankly, the easiest way to increase performance is to raise
the FSB about 5MHz. While I understand your desire for
stablity, overclockers take the chip up past 2.2GHz and
still can keep it stable. You're only 5% under the
expected average of the 2400 and 2600 reported above.

However, recognize that each type of performance test
stresses different things. Some emphasize raw clock speed
over cache size. That is what appears to be happening in
the CPU Bench test, since it is giving an Athlon 2600 with
lesser L2 cache, but higher overall MHz speed, a better
score. In a different benchmark, your Barton 2500 may
outperform the non-Barton 2600. This is one of the problems
with isolated synthetic tests. Your CPU should have
significantly better performance at anything that makes use
of the larger cache.