Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G Motherboard Review

Overclocking

Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G provides several overclocking options, including:

• Base clock: adjustment from 190 MHz to 600 MHz in 1 MHz increments.
• PCI Express clock: adjustment from 90 MHz to 250 MHz in 1 MHz increments.
• South Bridge (SB) reference clock: adjustment from 90 MHz to 150 MHz in 1 MHz increments.
• CPU voltage: From 0.800 V to 1.550 V in 0.025 V increments.
• CPU Vcore 7-Shift: Allows the increase of the adjusted CPU voltage from +5% to +35% in +5% increments.
• Memory voltage: From 1.70 V to 2.85 V in 0.05 V increments.
• North bridge (NB) voltage: 1.10 V, 1.15 V and 1.20 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).
• Full memory timings configuration.
• CPU Ratio (even though you can’t increase the clock multiplier, you may try decreasing it, see our Athlon 64 Overclocking tutorial for more info).

Figure 8: Overclocking options.

Figure 9: Memory timings adjustments.

Figure 10: HyperTransport adjustments.

With this motherboard we could increase the base clock from our Athlon X2 4600+ from 200 MHz to 212 MHz with the CPU running stable. Under this overclocking our CPU was running internally at 2,544 MHz, a 6% 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. We could achieve a far better overclocking with ECS GF8200A Black Series (230 MHz, 2,760 MHz). But since we didn’t play with all extra overclocking options provided by this motherboard you may achieve better results than we did.

Figure 11: Maximum overclocking we could set with this motherboard.