ECS GF9300T-A Black Series Motherboard Review

Overclocking

ECS GF9300T-A Black Series provides some overclocking options, including:

• CPU external clock: From 400 MHz to 2,500 MHz (100 MHz to 625 MHz) in 1 MHz (0.25 MHz) steps.
• Memory clock: can be configured independently from the CPU external clock from 400 MHz to 1,400 MHz (200 MHz to 700 MHz) in 1 MHz (0.5 MHz) steps.
• Memory voltage: +100 mV (+0.1 V), +200 mV (+0.2 V) or +300 mV (+0.3 V).< /li>
• North bridge (NB) voltage: +40 mV (+0.04 V), +80 mV (+0.08 V) or +120 mV (+0.12 V).

Figure 7: Overclocking options.

This motherboard provides the great feature of allowing you to configure the memory clock independently from the CPU external clock. However, no CPU voltage configuration is provided, and this motherboard has only one memory timing adjustment (only for the CL, CAS Latency).

Memory and FSB clocks are configured using their “inflated” QDR (four times the real clock) and DDR (two times the real clock) numbers, respectively. This means that each 1 MHz that you increase or decrease on the setup actually means 0.25 MHz or 0.5 MHz, respectively.

With this motherboard we could increase the external clock rate from our Pentium Dual Core E2180 (which originally runs internally at 2 GHz and externally at 200 MHz or 800 MHz QDR) up to 1,136 MHz QDR (284 MHz), an amazing 42% increase on the CPU external clock rate, which made our CPU to run internally at 2.84 GHz.