Overclocking
This board is an overclockers dream, it has every feature you need to get the absolute maximum out of your processor, the voltage adjustment's are unlike any other, I've seen before, take the default voltage and add 0.4 volts in 0.1 steps, this means that with a regular 1000Mhz Thunderbird you can get up to a theoretical 1.75 + 0.4 = 2.15 volts, due to normal tolerances in manufacturing and different power supply's I was actually getting 1.81 volts at default voltage.I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out the voltage options, here's what I came up with, all reading are taken from the BIOS, in PC Health section. The voltage seemed to peak at 2.08 volts I don't know if this was a limit on the board or an inacurate reading, but regardless 2.08 volts is enough for me for air cooling.
| Default = | 1.81 |
| 0.1 = | 1.91 |
| 0.2 = | 2.01 |
| 0.3 = | 2.08 |
| 0.4 = | 2.08 |
To adjust the core voltage you need to move a jumper on the board, there are 5 options for this, default plus the 4 * 0.1volts settings. So long as you don't lose the manual then you will be OK, this is a little more fiddly than the BIOS adjustments on some boards, but it gets the job done and that's all that matters.
To increase the voltage more I suppose you could try penciling in the L7 bridges on the top of the CPU, this would take the default voltage up to 1.85, which would possibly give you a higher core voltage, once you added the 0.4 volts from the motherboard. But since I'm using air cooling and my CPU seems maxed out anyway I haven't tried doing any more voltage tweaks.
As well as varying the core voltage, a full selection of features are available to help tweak the last ounce of speed out of the system, CPU multiplier is one feature which is lacking in many current AMD 761 DDR based motherboards, the feature is pretty easy to use on the Epox board, its simply a matter of setting a bank of 5 dipswitches.
As I've said before in the review, I'm running a 1000MHz AXIA CPU in the board, this runs happily enough in a KT133A board at 1500Mhz, it gets a bit unstable over 1500MHz though, The Epox board offers more voltage tweaks and seems more aimed as an overclockers board so lets see just what this beauty can do (O:.
I set the multiplier to 11.0 and the FSB to 133 that gave me 1466MHz on bootup this worked fine, so always in the quest for speed I tried for 1500MHz and achieved it with ease, I got all the way up to 1550MHz, where I began to get errors in Windows, I did manage to sneak a few benchmarks screenshots though, to get games running I had to drop down to 1517MHz. To get that speed I had to run at 138MHz FSB which wasn't the fastest configuration. I went for the highest FSB speeds that I could achieve, and I reached a maximum stable FSB of 150MHz so for optimum speed I set the multiplier back down to 10 and kept the FSB at 150MHz, giving me, 1500MHz (O:.
Here's WCPUID and Sandra showing 1550MHz (O:
This CPU was about as stable as a one legged man in an earthquake at 1550MHz, with water cooling or a Vapochill system I'm sure it would be a different story i.e. stable, but for now with the Thermo engine on it wasn't usable at 1550Mhz. If I was using water cooling or a Vapochill the large voltage adjustment for the CPU core would be very handy for getting the very very last bit of speed out of the CPU. The board seems ready to take on any overclocking that you might like to try. I like it I really do. When you do overclock to much it boots back up without to much messing about at the default FSB of 133MHz. Sometimes I've had to resort to pulling the battery on some motherboards to get them to reset after overclocking didn't work out, this hasn't been a problem with this board, and I have given it grief because I really wanted more from this CPU, but I don't think there's anymore to get out of it. Well that's enough of the silly overclocking, lets get the system stable and see what kind of game benchmarks you can get.
