Overclocking and System Setup

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

Overclocking on the ECS K7S5A is a bit more challenging than on other motherboards. While they don’t offer the ability to change the voltage or multipliers, you can edit front side bus modification with their latest bios, but the FSB selections are limited. Your only choices are: 100, 112, 133, 138 and 150 MHz. Having been spoiled by the 1 MHz increments that many other motherboard manufacturers are offering, this may seem a bit of a disappointment. They have included the option to run the FSB at 133 MHz and the system memory at 166 MHz, which is rather interesting as an overclocking option. Overall however, if the overclocking is what you plan on doing, the ECS K7S5A may not be your first choice of motherboards.

As I mentioned earlier, there are no RAID options for this series of boards, so there isn’t the option for additional IDE devices, etc that some will use.

Here is the system setup used for testing and the standard benchmarks I used:

Test System Setup
CPU AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz (133 MHz Bus)
Memory 2 x 128MB Corsair XMS2400 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE
Video Card Visiontek GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 12.90
Operating System Windows 98 SE

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark

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