Intel's 865/875 Superior Performance Song Remains the Same

Memory Test: 13 DImm Memory Pairs Tested

Trickery Afoot

We notice with some dismay that manufacturers are still attempting to gain some advantage by messing with the FSB. While we accept a tolerance of around 10 MHz above the CPU speed, Gigabyte sent us a new BIOS just before we finished testing, which actually provided 200 MHz FSB. Prior to that, we had measured nearly 3440 MHz! Even after receiving the new BIOS we still measured 3416 MHz, and manually selecting 198, 199 or 201 MHz FSB did nothing to change things. It is very sad to see this kind of dishonorable trickery used to obscure the relatively small differences that exist between boards.

Overclocking features should be optional, like the CoreCell chip from MSI. Or we can choose to overclock the traditional way: nearly all the boards are capable of booting with a 230 MHz FSB.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.