Asus, DFI, MSI Give Mobos The Crossfire Treatment

Overclocking

While the default system clock speed for all Socket 939 processors is 200 MHz and a multiplier of x5 is applied in order to hit the 1,000 MT/s (equal to 1,000 MHz) per direction (it is 2,000 MT/s or 2,000 MHz bi-directional), many of the recent Socket 939 motherboards based on current chipsets allow for considerable overclocking.

We locked down the processor's multiplier to as little as x6 in order to avoid overclocking it while searching for the highest possible system clock speed. Leaving the HTT Link at auto will adjust the HyperTransport just fine. At the same time, the memory speed has to be adjusted in order to operate it within its specifications.

A 300 MHz system base clock speed can easily be reached. We first ran into problems at 330 MHz. At 325 MHz, the system remained stable over a period of a complete working day looping several of our benchmarks.

However, Overclocking requires going into several BIOS sub pages, which we found a bit annoying. DFI solved this task much better by integrating all the settings into the "Genie BIOS" page.