For our overclocking tests we used an Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz) with 512 KB L2 memory cache based on Venice core, which has a better overclocking capability than our Athlon 64 3800+ used on our benchmarking.

Albatron K8SLI BIOS V.1.12 overclocking options:

• External frequency: can be adjusted from 200 to 450 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• PCI Express frequency: can be adjusted from 100 to 145 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• Clock multiplier: Can be set from 4x to 11x in 1x steps. 
• HTT bus multiplier: Can be set from 1x to 5x in 1x steps.
• CPU voltage: +5%, +10%, +15%.
• Memory voltage: Can be set from 2.70 V to 3.00 V at 0.10 V steps.
• Chipset voltage: Can be set from 1.5 V to 1.8 V at 0.10 V steps. 

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Figure 8: Basic overclocking options on K8SLI.

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Figure 9: Basic memory timings settings

On Figures 10 and 11 you can check the overclocking we could achieve with this motherboard

Figure 10: HTT configured at 365 MHz, an excellent result.

Figure 11: Our 2.2 GHz CPU running at 2.853 MHz (285 MHz x 10).

With K8SLI we could put our CPU running stable at 2.853 MHz (285 MHz x 10), an increase of almost 30% on its internal clock rate, an excellent result.

To achieve this overclocking we had to change the HyperTransport bus multiplier to 3x, the memory voltage to 2.80 V, the CPU voltage to 1.5 V and keeping the memory clock always below 250 MHz.

Besides its reduced size, K8SLI wasn’t intimidated, achieving better results than motherboard that costs up to twice its price.