Conclusion

Two interesting things about these benchmarks:

1. In this system configuration at least, “High Performance” is not high performance, which is why I only tested the “Optimal” profile with the CPUOC setting. One thing that’s so great about these profiles though is that what may not work as well in this system may do wonders in another system, all depending on hardware.

2. The performance gains the Ballistix is capable of thanks to these profiles is extraordinary. I picked up a 24% increase in both the Integer and Float benchmarks by switching the EPP and CPUOC settings, all at the cost of one step down on the clock multiplier and a rise from 200 MHz to 250 MHz on the front side bus. Compare that to the 15% increase I got from overclocking PC2-6400 RAM and you can see how useful the EPPs really are in finding the best settings. The setting even increased my CPU arithmetic benchmarks by about 2,000 MIPS and 2,000 MFLOPS; a very cool side effect of overclocking the memory.