ECS KA3 MVP Extreme Motherboard Review
Overclocking
Contents
ECS KA3 MVP Extreme offers several options for tweaking the memory access, as you can see in Figure 10. The main overclocking options can be seen in Figure 11 and listed below.
Figure 10: Memory settings.
Figure 11: Overclocking options.
On ECS KA3 MVP Extreme (1.0b BIOS) you will find the following overclocking options:
- Base clock (HTT clock, called CPU clock on this motherboard): Can be adjusted from 200 to 500 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
- CPU voltage (called NPT Vid Control on this motherboard): from 0.5500 V to 0.7625 V in 0.0125 V steps; from 0.775 V to 1.350 V in 0.025 V steps.
- Memory voltage: Can be set as normal or +0.05 V to +0.35 V in 0.05 V steps.
- North bridge voltage: Can be set as normal, +0.05 V, +0.10 V and +0.15 V.
- HyperTransport voltage: Can be set as normal, +0.05 V, +0.10 V and +0.15 V.
With this motherboard we increased the base clock of our CPU from 200 MHz to 220 MHz but the system wouldn’t boot. We increased the processor voltage to 1.325 V and the system started loaded the operating system. We could go stable up to 221 MHz (2,873 MHz internally), a 10.5% increase on the CPU clock. The performance measured by PCMark05 increased 6.44%.
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.