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Inhuman Experiments with Socket A Mainboards

by Anna Filatova
01/18/2001 | 03:55 AM

As we have already told you, the first mainboards based on VIA KT133A officially supporting 266MHz FSB started appearing in retail. And since there is more than one mainboard available today, we decided to find out which mainboard of the already available suit for proper AMD Duron overclocking by means of increasing the FSB frequency. We have already listed the major requirements to mainboards of the kind (see the news for 12 January), that’s why today we will simply check whether some mainboard really meet these requirements or not. We will take a look at the following pieces: ABIT KT7A (-RAID), Iwill KK266(-R) and EPoX EP-8KTA3, which we have at our disposal right now.
The table below shows what overclocking-friendly features all the three mainboards offer Duron overclockers:

Mainboard	FSB Frequency	Multiplier adjustment	Vcore adjustment	Vio adjustment	Notes
ABIT KT7A(-RAID)	100-183MHz (with 1MHz increments)	Yes	1.1-1.85V with 0.025V increments	3.2-3.9V with 0.1V increments
Iwill KK266(-R)	100-166MHz (with 1MHz increments)	Yes	1.525-1.85V with 0.025V increments	Allows Vio increase by 5 or 10%	No active chipset cooling
EPoX EP-8KTA3	100, 102, 104, 106-114, 116, 118, 120, 124, 127, 130, 136, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160, 166MHz	Yes	1.55-1.75V with 0.025V increments	3.4-3.75V with 0.05V increments	Allows changing Vagp within the interval 1.5-2V with 0.1V increments

The features listed in the table are accessible on all the three boards via BIOS Setup except Vio changing on Iwill KK266(-R), where you should do it with the jumper.
And now we would like to turn to a bit of practice. To check how all this stuff is working, we tried overclocking AMD Duron 650 (43d week) having reduced its clock multiplier down to 6x and rising the FSB frequency as greatly as we could. Vio and Vcore were set to the maximum allowed value in this case. Here is what we managed to obtain:<%BANNER[article]%>

Mainboard	Max FSB frequency achieved
ABIT KT7A(-RAID)	161MHz
Iwill KK266(-R)	156MHz
EPoX EP-8KTA3	155MHz

Well, once again ABIT proved that it owns the reputation of the best board for extreme overclocking not for nothing: it allowed setting the highest FSB frequency of all the boards tested. Here is a screenshot taken on the winner:

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