Now let’s take a look at such an important page of the BIOS Setup as Frequency/Voltage Control.

What can we say here? There are quite many controls, especially for one mainboard, which is not positioned as an overclocker’s choice. There is also a pretty exotic item called DDR Termination Voltage, which actual efficiency is quite doubtful to me. However, we will not just enumerate all settings. Let’s better check their quality and efficiency, i.e. the increments for the adjustable parameters.

So, FSB Clock can be adjusted from 100MHz to 280MHz; the CPU ratio – from 6 to 15; the CPU Vcore – from 1.575V to 1.7V with 0.025V increment or Auto (too low); DDR Voltage – from 2.5V (Auto) to 2.8V with 0.1V increment; Termination Voltage can be set to 1.27V, 1.29V or Auto; the AGP Voltage can be set to Auto and to any value from 1.6V to 1.8V with 0.1V increment. These are pretty worthy intervals, really, except the processor Vcore, which has been reduced to unbelievably narrow interval for some unknown reason.

I don’t know if you noticed it or not, but I haven’t yet said a single word about the opportunity to change or check the frequencies and dividers for the AGP and PCI buses. It is not because I forgot about it, but because there is no way to check or even change these frequencies and dividers. Absolutely no way! You can’t see or adjust them in the BIOS, you will never notice them during POST, nowhere. The mainboard must be setting these dividers on its own, which might be correct, but the available divider set is very limited. Also, starting from a certain FSB frequency, the AGP and PCI speeds will grow up continuously until they turn pretty dangerous. However, the user will learn about it only when he sees some weird artifacts on the monitor or receives a message from the HDD check utility about the FAT defect.

Having seen everything I have just mentioned above, I got very well prepared for the overclocking tests: I didn’t expect any high results. For our tests we took a specially prepared AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processors, reduced the multiplier to 9, the Vcore grew to 1.7, the memory timings were set to 2.5-3-3-7-1 (we used two Corsair XMS3200C2 memory modules) and we kept increasing the FSB frequency until the system started stumbling at list in one of the tests. We used the following tests: 3DMark2001 SE and SPECviewperf 7.1. Actually, I was right when I hoped for relatively low results: the system worked stably only at 177MHz FSB, which is not a great achievement.