Overclocking

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

It is in this section that the Epox motherboard really begins to shine and step up to the plate. On this KT133A chipset motherboard, they have let the user have the ability to modify all the necessary components to allow the best overclocking experience. And to make things even better, they have moved them from the motherboard to the Bios menus.

The Vcore settings allow you to modify the voltage of the processor up to 1.85v, which is fairly standard these days. The Vio voltage can be modified as well. There is a new option that I have not seen yet, the Vagp setting, which controls the amount of voltage that is used on your AGP port. While I didn’t do any tweaking of the Vagp option, I guess its good to have more options than less.

Also included are the bios selections for the multiplier and system bus. With multipliers available up to 12.5x and system bus options available up to 155 MHz, this motherboard has the most options I have seen on a motherboard. There is however, one cleverly used jumper: one that switches the FSB from using a system bus of 100 – 120 MHz to the system bus of 133 – 155 MHz.

The Epox 8KTA3 motherboard gives the user all the available tweaks options to make their processor perform at its limit. Abit had better watch out, as Epox could very well take the crown of overclockers-choice away from them.

With all these options available to us, what did the overclocking experience hold for us? It was simply amazing: with a new 133/266 MHz FSB rated Athlon 1.2 GHz processor, I was able to get it running at 150/300 MHz FSB stable, with a multiplier of 9x for a total speed of 1.35 GHz, which the highest we have seen here at Amdmb.com! While I was able to get some posts at speeds slightly higher, including 151 and 152 MHz FSB, they were in no way stable in Windows. Oh well, 1350 MHz is a usable speed though, wouldn’t you say? For our tests, I am including the results from the Abit KT7-RAID, the Gigabyte 7DXC, the Epox 8KTA3 @ 133 MHz and the Epox 8KTA3 @ 150 Mhz. Here are the system specs for the tests running on the Epox 8KTA3 motherboard:

Test System Setup
CPU AMD Thunderbird 1.2 GHz (133 MHz Bus)
Memory 1 x 256MB PC133 SDRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE
Video Card Hercules 3D Prophet II 64MB
Video Drivers Detonator 6.13
Operating System Windows 98 SE
MB Revision v0.3
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