Overclocking

Being a low-end motherboard, this board doesn’t provide any fancy feature for overclocking, like voltage configurations. At least it allows you to change the external clock from 200 MHz to 232 MHz in 1 MHz increments. We were able to put our Athlon 64 3200+ (2 GHz) running externally at 223 MHz (2.23 GHz internally), an 11.5% increment over the standard clock. Not bad at all.

Even though this motherboard doesn’t have any extra overclocking feature, it allows you to change the memory timings, as you can see on Figure 6. So with some patience maybe you can squeeze an extra performance by lowering memory timings on this motherboard.

click to enlarge
Figure 6: Memory timings configuration.

A piece of advice. As you can see, on this screen the memory clock can be changed using the “Memclock index value” option. We don’t know why, but this board came to us with this option configured at 133 MHz. After finishing our benchmark we double check all setup configurations and noticed that this value was wrong, since we were using DDR400 memories. So, we change this option to “auto” and run again our benchmarking programs. The performance gain was amazing: 6.22% on SYSmark2002, 63.18% on 3DMark2001 SE, 44.36% on 3DMark03 and 54% on Quake III. So, double check this option to ensure you will get the maximum performance this motherboard can provide. The values we used on the previous pages were the values collected in this second round, i.e. with this option set to "auto".

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