I’ve set up my new computer and have decided to test just how far I can push it.
I’ve overclocked it to 3.10 GHz, which is an impressive 900 MHz over spec. The RAM has been running 560 MHz and nothing is out of order — the most impressive part of my new computer appears to be the motherboard which handles an extreme amount of overclocking on both processor and memory.
I’ve tested the computer at 2.2 GHz with a few homebrewn programs — one that finds primes using multiplication and one that multiplies large matrices. The prime program finishes in about half time a Core 2 Duo running 1.86 GHz with too much caches (the program is extremly sensitive to the amount of cache available) does, taking about 1.5 seconds to test all integers up to 10.000.000. The matrix program I haven’t tested on the Core 2 machine, but it takes about 26 seconds to finish multiplying two 1250 x 1250 matrix using both cores (through OpenMP) and the naive matrix multiplication algorithm.
All in all, I am quite happy with my purchase, especially considering that if I need more power, it’s only a reboot and 10 seconds of configuration away — for a 40% increase in processor speed..
