How fast for an xp 1700?

[BigSmith]

what about the MSI K7N2-L? how does it fare in overclocking?

[Jingle Jingle]

Hey... about the gigabytes not being good OC boards... I bought my gigabyte GA7VRXP based on Tom's Hardware Guide saying it was one of the best socket A boards out there. And Tom like to OC, as you can tell if you read his guides, so there's no way Tom would reccomend a board if it had no OCing capabilities. But some giga boards may be bad for OCs.


DT

[Grentarc]

I go off experience rather than reviews from THG........

I have used around 10 or more different gigabyte boards.. and the last ones - GA-7VRXP(rev 2.0) and the big brother GA-7VAXP... both have very little OC abiltiy.. only 10% max Vcore increase.
The 7VRXP has bad implimentation of a 1/5 divider.. .so bad I could never get it to work
The USB 2.0 controllers cause instablities with RAM running at 333 at any timings and any voltage. Disabling them allowed me to get agressive timings (using un-modded or modded bios - i know that advanced settings are available anyway... this one has many more than the "Advanced features" that you can access normally) to work stable (using Corsair XMS2700)

Compare that to the AT7-Max2 i have been working on lately...
with 1GB Corsair XMS3200 and a dodgy Palomino XP1700+ (unlock only allowed 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5, 11, 11.5, 12 multipliers, plus a very chipped core) we were able to hit an FSB of 200MHz with tight ram timings. Uses the same USB 2.0 controller as the gigabyte boards. The 1/5 divider is simple to use. no need to have a modded bios to get all the ram timings you want. Voltage all the way to 2.3 Vcore and 3.2 for the ram.
This CPU hit a new record or 1.78GHz in this system (vapochill not pressing hard enough for it to work properly.) stable. I could barely get the sasme chip stable at stocked speed in the 7VRXP board

This test has shown me that while Gigabytes may be ok.. they are no match for high quality motherboards.

[Jingle Jingle]

oh, well you may be right about some things but my only problem w/ OCing on my gig board is that my cpu is locked and the fsb gets unstable above 146. But once i unlock the cpu (1700xp ~ 1473) and get the mult. to 12.5x, that shouldn't be a prob as i'll be running at, hopefully, 12.5*136 (1700). If that works i might try 12.5*140 (1750). goin out to get some silver lacquer and superglue tomorrow . plus a new fan.


DT