Overclocking

We have been talking about what the MSI P6n SLI Platinum can do theoretically. Its resources look good. Its quality of manufacture and setup opportunities match those of best overclocker-targeted products. Still, we shouldn’t hurry up with our conclusions until a practical test.

To check out the MSI P6N SLI Platinum at overclocking we took 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM (Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D), a PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB graphics card, and a Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD hard disk drive. The nForce 650i SLI chipset can clock memory in quasi-asynchronous mode, so our memory modules always worked at a frequency of 800MHz or a little lower with timings of 4-4-4-12-1T. The CPUs were cooled by a Cooler Master GeminII (for details on this cooler see our article called Big Typhoon Squared: Cooler Master GeminII Review), and an additional 40mm fan, the one included with the mainboard, was installed on the North Bridge. Stability of the overclocked system was verified by means of the SP2004/ORTHOS program based on Prime95 code.

First we took a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. Using it, we wanted to find the top FSB frequency the MSI P6N SLI Platinum would be stable at. So, we lowered the CPU frequency multiplier to 7x and began to increase the FSB clock rate steadily to find its limit. We had to increase the chipset voltage to 1.4V and the CPU VTT voltage to 4% and then to 8% to make the system more stable at FSB frequencies of about 400MHz. With these settings and with the CPU core voltage increased by 0.2V we managed to reach a FSB frequency of 475MHz. That was the highest we could get.

This was not a success, though. The mainboard worked quite normally in Windows at a 475MHz FSB and passed every stability test, but could not start up at such settings. It rebooted normally, but could not perform a cold start. As soon as you shut the system down, your overclocking attempts were ruined. We checked out everything but the problem persisted. So, you can overclock the mainboard to a 475MHz FSB, but only until you shut it down. And when you try to start the system up after that, it doesn’t start at first, but then resets BIOS settings to their defaults. All settings, not only overclocking-related ones. It was then that we regretted the lack of an option to store different profiles with BIOS Setup settings because we had to perform another series of experiments to find out the top FSB frequency the mainboard would be able to cold-start at.

The results were rather disappointing: the MSI P6N SLI Platinum could only cold-start at FSB frequencies not higher than 375MHz. So, this rather low value is the highest you can use in practice. You don’t want to set up all the BIOS settings again each time you cold-start your PC, do you?

We were about to write a very critical conclusion to this review when we thought about trying a Core 2 Duo E4300. You don’t have to select high FSB frequencies for this CPU because it has a default frequency multiplier of 9x. The top FSB frequency was 380MHz in that case – we achieved it by increasing the CPU core voltage by 0.2V above the default.