GA-EP31-DS3L is clearly a mainstream motherboard but its overclocking support puts this motherboard in a completely different category. Something that is really complicated about this motherboard (and other mainstream motherboards from the same manufacturer) is that you have to press Ctrl+F1 inside the motherboard setup to enable all advanced configurations this board has, and this option isn’t clearly announced by the manufacturer.

You can configure this motherboard to run at several different dynamic overclocking levels, feature that automatically increases the front side bus clock rate between 5% and 19%. If you prefer, you can manually adjust this clock rate in 1 MHz steps, from 100 MHz way up to 700 MHz (i.e. up to 2,800 MHz QDR). You can also lock the PCI Express clock rate, a feature that increases the chances of a successful overclocking.

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Figure 13: CPU clock adjustment.

Memory speed can be configured thru a FSB clock multiplier, from 2.0 to 4.0. As the minimum adjustment for this multiplier is 2 when configuring the CPU external bus to 1,600 MHz QDR (400 MHz) memories will have to work at least at 800 MHz.

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Figure 14: Memory multiplier adjustment.

You can find practically all latency adjustments for fine tunings on this motherboard. Besides that you can increase or decrease the voltages used by several circuits from this motherboard, including the CPU and the memories, of course.

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Figure 15: Memory timings adjustment.

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Figure 16: CPU voltage adjustment.

With this motherboard we could set a dual-core Celeron E1200 running at 3.0 GHz (its original clock is 1.6 GHz) with a 375 MHz (1,500 MHz QDR) external clock rate, which represents an amazing 87.5% increase on its internal clock rate. And we didn’t even try to push harder. With patience and increasing voltages you may be able to achieve even higher overclocking levels.