ECS G33T-M2 has some overclocking and memory timings settings. Here are the options you will find on ECS G33T-M2 (May 31st, 2007 BIOS):
- CPU Reference Frequency: Instead of having an option to adjust the CPU external clock rate (FSB clock) this motherboard provides this option that goes from 100 MHz to 255 MHz into 1 MHz steps. This translates in a FSB adjustment from 266 MHz to 680 MHz.
- Memory voltage: 1.85 V, 1.90 V, 1.95 V and 2.00 V.
On Figure 5 you can see all memory timings adjustments that this motherboard has.
click to enlarge
Figure 5: Memory timings adjustments.
This motherboard provides this funny “CPU reference frequency” configuration instead of its external clock rate. This option can be set in 1 MHz steps but since the external clock rate was 2.66 times higher than the reference clock (on our case, where we were using a CPU with 266 MHz external bus – a.k.a. 1,066 MHz), the FSB itself couldn't be increased in 1 MHz steps.
Nevertheless we could set the external clock rate at 314 MHz (reference clock of 118 MHz) with stability. With this overclocking our Core 2 Duo E6700 which normally runs at 2.66 GHz was running internally at 3.14 GHz, a 18% increase over its standard clock rate. Not bad at all for a motherboard with on-board video.
With this overclocking the performance measured by PCMark05 increased 12.8% and the performance measured by Quake III increased 7.4%.
Keep in mind that we could set a higher clock rate but the system wasn’t stable. We only consider an overclocking to be successful after we could run PCMark05 and Quake III at least four times with no crashes.
We missed several overclocking options on this motherboard, especially CPU voltage adjustments and higher memory voltage adjustments – memory modules targeted to overclocking usually work at 2.2 V or 2.3 V and this motherboard does not provide these voltages.
Of course this is asking too much, as this motherboard has integrated video, a class of motherboards that traditionally comes with limited overclocking capability.
