Testing and Overclocking
Overclocking may seem like a misnomer here, as it is akin to overclocking a laptop, but why not get the most out of your system? What can be gained by overclocking a system such as this? With the right memory – the answer is responsiveness. I feel we are qualified to say what is fast, what is not and judge everything in between fairly. The E45M1-I does not have a fast CPU at its heart and it can never be fast and the memory speeds are slow by today’s standards which leaves one asking – “What does overclocking do for the E45M1-I?” It makes it snappier! Not really faster, just more capable of responding quickly to commands and it makes light multitasking a bit smoother.
Before we get into the overclocking any further one thing needs to be stressed here. All results above a 105 reference clock were obtained using Kingston HyperX 2133 memory. The timings were left in auto (resulting in the same timings as the 1333) using the 2133 memory; save the final test which used tightened timings.
Synthetic testing, baselines, tweaking and overclocking
The only tests used here are PC Wizard (to measure performance increases only) and PC Mark7 (to compare to other systems) as each tests a range of functions and compiles the results into a global system score. As we are simply looking at the general usage aspects of the E45M1-I to better understand how it compares to other systems out there we used the popularity of PCMark7 to our advantage. PCMark7 is probably the most widely used, up to date, test that is comparable to other machines, thanks to the databases at FutureMark and HWBot.
We will start with the PCWizard testing and we find quite a bit of improvement from overclocking and a final memory tweak. To visually represent this the following chart is composed of resulting scores that represent different levels of overclocking and then a final memory timing tweak.
Moving to PCMark7 tests which were run at the beginning (baseline) and end of our testing. Both the base and maximum stable overclock are recorded with links to the scores and links for comparison are provided.
http://3dmark.com/compare/pcm7/381498/pcm7/380120
E45M1-I results were compared to fairly modern, lower end, AMD Phenom 9500 quad core and Intel Pentium G6950 setups (which are examples of ststems used in many office environments today) at FutureMark. The AMD comparative results are at the following link – http://bit.ly/NragqX – and the Intel results are linked here – http://bit.ly/LOlDZR. To add to this, a wider selection of systems (most are overclocked) that are in the same performance range HWBot results are linked here: http://bit.ly/MQXPYx (pcmark7 comparison baseline 1563) and http://bit.ly/N5q1aB (pcmark7 Max OC 1706)
