We didn’t expected to find complete overclocking options on a motherboard targeted to the HTPC market, so it came to a complete surprise to us when we find out that MA78GM-S2H had several overclocking options.
As it happens on other Gigabyte motherboards, there is an option called “M.I.T.” (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) with several overclocking options on the motherboard setup. But if you press Control + F1 on the setup main screen this “M.I.T.” menu displays even more options.
On MA78GM-S2H this menu is really complete: you can increase the CPU base clock in 1 MHz steps up to 500 MHz, you can configure the HyperTransport clock, the memory controller clock, the memory clock and the PCI Express clock. You also have an option to change the CPU clock multiplier.
There are also voltage adjustment options for the CPU (up to +0.6 V increase), memories (up to +0.3 V increase) and north bridge chip (up to +0.3 V increase). You can’t, however, reduce any voltage.
There are also complete memory timings adjustments as you can see on Figure 11.
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Figure 10: Overclocking options.
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Figure 11: Memory timing options.
We didn’t play a lot with this motherboard but we could easily put a 2.3 GHz Phenom X4 CPU working at 2.53 GHz (10% increase on the CPU internal clock). With more time and patience you will be able to achieve a higher overclocking for sure.
