Overclocking
Contents
For our overclocking tests we used an Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz) with 512 KB L2 memory cache based on Venice core, which has a better overclocking capability than our Athlon 64 3800+ used on our benchmarking.
ECS KN1 SLI Extreme BIOS V.1.12 overclocking options:
- External frequency: Can be adjusted from 200 to 400 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
- Clock multiplier: Can be set from 4x to 25x in 0.5x steps.
- HTT bus multiplier: Can be set from 1x to 5x in 1x steps.
- CPU voltage: +25 mV to +375 mV in 25 mV steps.
- Memory voltage: Can be set from 2.55 V to 3.11 V.
KN1 SLI Extreme has very basic overclocking options. Its clock multiplier with 0.5x steps called our attention, however this option is hidden under “Power Management” menu.
Figure 10: Overclocking options on KN1 SLI Extreme.
Figure 11: Its clock multiplier is hidden on Power Management menu.
Figure 12: Basic memory timings settings.
On Figures 13 and 14 you can check the overclocking we could achieve with this motherboard.
Figure 13: HTT configured at 367 MHz, an excellent result.
Figure 14: Our 2.2 GHz CPU running at 2,868 MHz (286 MHz x 10).
With KN1 SLI Extreme we could put our CPU running stable at 2,868 MHz (286 MHz x 10), an increase of almost 30% on its internal clock rate, an excellent result.
To achieve this overclocking we had to change the HyperTransport bus multiplier to 3x, the memory voltage to 2.80 V, the CPU voltage to 1.5 V and keeping the memory clock always below 250 MHz.
