Overclocking
Although two-phased power design is used (such scheme is also used only by
MSI for their KT266A boards), the motherboard has shown very high stability.
Actually, I must remark, that higher voltage on memory (set by default) has
played its role. Though we should have been getting used to this feature of Asus
motherboards.
Four capacitors (1x3300uF and 3x1500uF) are installed on the motherboard. We
might assume that work stability upon conditions of higher frequencies (overclocking)
can disappoint sophisticated user. However, the tested motherboard has shown
excellent stability with overclocking (I have launched MadOnion 3dmark in the
evening and it was still working in the next morning).
In the beginning of my review I was telling about serious variance of the
motherboard from KT266A reference-design. Finally, I must conclude that this
variance did not affect work stability and overclocking possibilities.
And, surely, the possibility of increasing CPU core voltage is provided.
VID1-VID4 switches are used for this purpose. Their different combinations allow
setting the following voltages:
1.85V,1.825V, 1.80V, 1.775V, 1.75V, 1.725V and 1.70V ,1.675V.
By the way, processor’s type should be chosen with PALO_FREQ jumpers. The
possible values are: Palomino and Athlon/Duron (default).
And finally a possibility of chipset and memory voltage increase is provided for
overclocking fine-tuning. JP1/JP2 jumpers are used for this purpose. They allow
setting the following values: 2.5V, 2.65V (default), 2.75V and 2.8V.
As you can see, jumper-based tweaking is very inconvenient process. Moreover its
possibilities are very limited. Setting CPU parameters with BIOS is absolutely
different. JumperFree™ technology is developed for these purposes. In order to
activate it, the JEN jumper should be set to 2-3 position and all the
dip-switches in CPU_RATIO and SYSCLK blocks should be set to OFF. Actually,
there’s no need to care about this, because the motherboard is set to this
mode by default.
BIOS provides much more overclocking resources.
Here is an example of CPU multiplier selection (range from 5 to up to 14 with a
step of 0.5) or FSB frequency selection (from 100 up to 227MHz with a step of
1MHz). I’d like to accentuate the last moment. 227MHz is the highest frequency
among ALL the motherboards based on KT266A chipset. Even such an apparent
overclocking leader as Epox 8KHA+ has the maximal frequency of 200MHz (210MHz
more specific with a special “overclocking” BIOS edition).
