Gigabyte Brings Value Back With AM2: GA-M55plus-S3G Motherboard Review- Page 3/5
November 15, 2006
By
Thomas Soderstrom
BIOS and Overclocking
The GA-M55plus-S3G exposes most overclocking functions to basic users, but those more "in the know" can use the CTL-F1 key combo to bring up an additional menu to control vital things such as HT (HyperTransport) multiplier, HT width, DRAM speed and timings, and spread spectrum settings.
The Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker menu offers CPU frequencies from 200 to 500MHz in 2MHz steps, CPU multiplier from 5x to the CPU limit, PCI Express clocks from 100 to 200MHz in 1MHz steps, CPU-HT Link voltage increases of +0.10V and +0.20V, Southbridge and Northbridge/PCI-E/HT-Link voltages of +2 to +16%, DRAM voltages from 1.80V to 2.20V plus 2.30V and 2.45V, CPU VCore of 0.800V to 1.550V in 25mV steps, and VGA overclocking up to 50 percent in 1 percent steps.
Our Orleans-core Athlon 64 3200+ seems to present a challenge for many motherboards, as few have been able to modify its stock 10x multiplier. Stuck at the CPU's default 10x multiplier, Gigabyte's FA-M55plus-S3G was no exception. Nor was its maximum 216MHz HT clock at 5x HT multiplier exceptional, but dropping to 4x HT allowed us to reach 250MHz reference clock. A respectable 2.5GHz from our 2.0GHz core was the final result.
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