With the chipset's A stepping, a register could be used to remove the overclocking lock. The current stepping (B1), however, does not allow for the 'feature' to be disabled any more.

However, we know of two motherboard makers that have already managed to override the overclocking limiter successfully: Asus and Gigabyte. And it isn't really difficult, but it's a shame to think that smaller manufacturers simply don't have enough manpower make such a venture possible.

Usually, the PLL is initialized at system startup in order to lock the frequency that is stored in BIOS. Here's where we need to start, since it won't lock frequencies that exceed the internal limiter. Intel accomplished this by linking the PLL to the assertion time of the Northbridge reset signal.

After adding a little hardware modification, the two companies mentioned above managed to pass control over the PLL ready time to the BIOS. Each frequency has a different PLL locking time that the BIOS software needs to be aware of. Based on that information, the BIOS will now adjust the period of time the system remains in reset mode until the PLL successfully locks the clock.

New Memory: DDR2-533

Dual DDR2-533 will be the memory to go with until Intel adds the 925XE chipset in Q3. Different from our original estimation, the next generation DDR2 at 333 MHz (DDR2-667) will be available very soon, even before the platforms will be available to support it.