Section 3: Performance & overclocking

<strong>Performance</strong>

You can see from the results below that this PC would elicit much laughter if it were reviewed in Custom PC at its stock CPU speed. However, it's worth noting that the machine was more than quick enough for general work (such as writing this article) in Windows Vista at its stock speed, and you won't be running this PC overclocked all the time, given the lack of cooling for the motherboard's VRMs.

When it's overclocked to 3GHz (see opposite), however, this &pound;447 PC is a monster. In fact, its scores in the image editing and multithreaded video encoding tests were very similar to those of a fully fledged Core 2 E6750 CPU, which currently costs &pound;123.36 inc VAT. Of course, the Pentium E2140 won't match a Core 2 processor clock for clock, as it has only 1MB of Level 2 cache, but the performance is still incredible for a sub-&pound;45 chip.

The only area in which the PC failed to deliver was our multitasking test, but this isn't surprising, given the 1MB of cache on the CPU. However, you're unlikely to use your PC for that level of multitasking very often, and it handles everything else just fine.

<strong>Overclocking the graphics card</strong>

Overclocking your graphics card is easy; you simply need the right software. There are many packages for this, with popular choices including RivaTuner and ATITool. However, for simplicity's sake, we're going to use PowerStrip (www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm), which is a free download. When you've installed PowerStrip, load it up, right click on its icon next to your clock and go to Performance Profiles, and then Configure.

You'll be presented with two sliders; the left slider controls your GPU clock and the right slider manages your memory clock. When we first tested the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT, we found that we could overclock the memory to 1.07GHz (2.14GHz effective) and the core to 687MHz. Sadly, due to the limited cooling in this case, we found that this overclock wasn't stable in this system. However, the PC managed a stable overclock with the core set to 650MHz and the memory set to 932MHz (1.86GHz effective), which provided an excellent performance boost.

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