Overclocking

However, the mainboard got a good mark only for theoretical features. The situation with practical results turned out dramatically bad.

First of all, I was pretty surprised with the fact that Watch Dog Function parameter in the Power NIOS section is disabled by default. If I am not mistaken, EPoX was the first company to implement correctly automatic system restart in case of over-overclocking, when the initialization process cannot even be completed. It turned out that this parameter had been disabled for a reason: it was hardly operational. We had to restart the system 6-7 times in a row, before it would finally restart correctly. And we had to be so persistent, because the Clear CMOS jumper is practically useless, due to its extremely inconvenient location on the PCB, which we have already mentioned above.

But this is not the end yet. After the system rebooting in case of excessive overclocking, all normal mainboards would usually ask you if you would like to enter BIOS Setup to correct the wrongly set parameters. EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI skips that and just keeps on booting the OS. As far as we remember, only Gigabyte mainboards used to be so unfriendly to overclocking fans in the past. Could EPoX have got a new developer team?

For our overclocking tests we used Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor that can work stably at around 500MHz FSB with appropriate increase of the chipset North Bridge voltage and processor Vcore. We started with a relatively low frequency of 430MHz FSB, but even in this case we overestimated the mainboard’s abilities. It only managed to boot successfully at 310MHz FSB! Unbelievably low result!

AT that time we assumed that the mainboard didn’t work correctly with the memory, since CPU-Z utility reported a CAS Latency of 3, while it was set to 5 in the BIOS. This supposition proved partially true, because when we set the memory timings to Auto (for Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 the nominal settings were 4-4-4-12), the system started at 330MHz FSB, although the CPU-Z reported the timing settings of 3-6-6-23. This extremely low overclocking result should be taken as the final. The stability in this case was tested with a couple of Prime95 utilities running simultaneously.

We looked for memory with higher nominal timings and decided to check out Patriot PDC21G8000ELK (5-5-5-15). The mainboard, however, set even more ridiculous timings for these modules: 3-4-4-10, but the system would now boot at 360MHz FSB. I believe that this improvement results from the fact that total amount of system memory has been lowered from 2GB in case of Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 memory to 1GB in case of Patriot modules.

I assume that awful overclocking capabilities of this mainboard have a lot to do with its inability to adjust the FSB Strap. The indirect evidence of that is the lowered maximum FSB frequency for CPUs supporting 200MHz and 133MHz bus. However, it is not the reasons but the results that matter most. And the results indicate that EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI is incapable of overclocking Intel Core processors.