Gigabyte Takes On the AMD/ATI Platform: GA-MA69VM-S2 Motherboard Review- Page 3/5
June 27, 2007
By
Thomas Soderstrom
BIOS and Overclocking
Even before we go into detail about our overclocking achievements, we couldn't help but reveal that the GA-MA69VM-S2 overclocked our CPU with such stability that its 17 percent clock increase was possible without even the smallest increase in core voltage.
That 17 percent overclock sure sounds impressive, but it doesn't make up for the reason we didn't raise our CPU voltage: GA-MA69VM-S2 BIOS contains no voltage settings!
Like most Gigabyte high-volume boards, the "CTL-F1" key combination must be selected from the main BIOS menu to reveal the Advanced Chipset Features menu.
HT Clock can be increased all the way to 500MHz, in moderately small 2MHz increments. A few readers won't recognize these numbers, so lets use a bit of marketing speak: The HT rate can be selected between the stock "HT2000" and a maximum setting of "HT5000". That's without discussing HT multiplier settings...
At any rate, its important for the less-initiated to know that the clock rate for an HT2000 bus is 200MHz: It uses a 5x data multiplier, and only looks ten times as high because AMD adds the simultaneous upstream and downstream bandwidth to its marketing label. Unlike Intel's FSB, AMD's HT link upstream and downstream data bits don't trip over each other.
Gigabyte does allow full memory control, but again without DRAM voltage control.
The GA-MA69VM-S2 was unfortunately unable to run any of our DDR2-800 modules at rated timings, due to its memory voltage limitation. The shown "Automatic" settings worked for our Super Talent CAS PC2-6400 4-4-3-8 modules, a set which occasionally requires 1.90V to stably reach its full ratings.
With no manual voltage control, the system ran stably at 240MHz but suffered an issue in which the clock speed would be reset on restart. As a result, our highest stable speed to "stick" was 236MHz, using an Athlon 64 3200+.
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