ECS GF8200A Black Series Motherboard Review

Overclocking

ECS GF820
0A Black Series provides a few overclocking options, including:

• Base clock: adjustment from 200 MHz to 600 MHz in 2 MHz increments.
• Memory voltage: 1.90 V, 1.97 V, 2.04 V, 2.11 V, 2.18 V, 2.26 V, 2.33 V and 2.40 V.
• North bridge (NB) voltage: 1.13 V, 1.17 V, 1.20 V and 1.24 V.
• HyperTransport (HT) voltage: 1.20 V, 1.25 V, 1.30 V and 1.35 V.
• HyperTransport clock: 200 MHz, 400 MHz, 600 MHz, 800 MHz, 1000 MHz and auto (probably will show more options when a Phenom CPU is installed). This option is located on “Advanced Setup.”

Figure 7: Overclocking options from GF8200A.

With this motherboard we could increase the base clock from our Athlon X2 4600+ from 200 MHz to 230 MHz with the CPU running stable. Under this overclocking our CPU was running internally at 2,775 MHz, a 15.62% increase from its default clock rate of 2.400 MHz. We could set our CPU running at higher clock rates, but the system was unstable.

Figure 8: Maximum overclocking we could set with this motherboard.