ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe Motherboard Review

Overclocking

ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe offers several options for tweaking the memory access, as you can see in Figure 10. The main overclocking options can be seen on Figures 11 and 12 and are listed below.

Figure 10: Memory settings.

Figure 11: Overclocking options.

Figure 12: Overclocking options.

On ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe (0117 BIOS) you will find the following overclocking options:

• Base clock (HTT clock): Can be adjusted from 200 to 400 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• CPU voltage: from 0.8000 V to 1.3625 V in 0.0125 V steps.
• Memory voltage: Can be set as auto or 1.800 V to 2.500 V in 0.025 V steps.
• PCI Express clock: Can be adjusted as auto or 100 MHz to 200 MHz in 1 MHz steps.

This PCI Express clock configuration is very important, as you can lock the PCI Express clock at a given value (100 MHz, for example). Usually when you increase the CPU base clock (HTT clock) you will automatically increase the PCI Express clock as well, and sometimes your overclocking will be limited not by the CPU but by the devices connected to the PCI Express bus. Thus with this option you can increase the probability of setting a higher overclocking.

With this motherboard we increased the base clock of our CPU from 200 MHz to 220 MHz and the system worked just fine. We increased the processor voltage to 1.325 V and locked the PCI Express bus at 100 MHz and we were able to go stable only up to 221 MHz (2,873 MHz internally), a 10.5% increase on the CPU clock (our Athlon 5000+ runs internally at 2.6 GHz), the same result we achieved with ECS KA3 MVP Extreme. The performance measured by PCMark05 increased 6.35% with this overclocking.

We could configure higher clocks, but the system was unstable. Since the only setting we played with was the CPU voltage, you will probably achieve better results than we did with more time and patience.