Spring Speed Leap: AMD Athlon64 FX-53

Which Boards For Socket 940 Allow Overclocking?

The bare facts of the matter are that AMD does allow free choice of greater multipliers - even if the processor itself will only ideally manage a few hundred megahertz more of speed.

As far as we are aware, there are six mobos that support the Athlon64 FX on Socket 940: the SK8N and SK8V from Asus, Gigabyte's K8NNXP-940, the K8T Master from MSI and the K8NFX and K8NW from Leadtek. Apart from the Asus SK8V and the MSI K8T Master, all of them work with nVIDIA's nForce 3 Pro 150, the former with the K8T800 from VIA.

A list of recommended motherboards can be found on AMD's Website. However, during our tests, some of the BIOS versions were no longer up to date.

Since all FX processors so far delivered can be operated with both higher and lower multipliers than intended, AMD thus offers a great platform for overclocking. The table below lists which boards can be overclocked.

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Header Cell - Column 0 BIOSAthlon 64 FX-51Athlon 64 FX-53
Asus SK8N1005Beta 006yesyes
Asus SK8V1002Beta 019nono
Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP-940Releaseyesyes
MSI K8T Master / MS-91301.20Betano*no*
Leadtek K8NFX040108noNo

* According to MSI, the multiplier can't be changed at all.