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.

The MSI motherboard offers all the options that the opposing KT266A motherboards have offered. This includes multipliers up to 15x, Vcore changes up to 1.85v and front-side bus settings up to 164 MHz. The 164 MHz limit on the FSB is probably going to turn away most of the very hardcore overclockers from this board. While I can see MSI releasing an updated bios that allows the user to choose higher FSBs, I wouldn’t want to wait around for it. In fact, because all the memory tweaks and options you could want are included in the bios, the FSB is the only thing keeping this board from having the best overclocking setup available.

Since I have been asked several times to report this, I’ll let you know that I was able to run my USB mouse and USB memory card reader on the MSI board while having the FSB max’ed out at 164 MHz. The KT266A chipset seems to have been able to correct this problem and while I didn’t test this on other boards over 164 MHz, I can only assume they would work as well.

The board did run stable the entire time and I didn’t run into any crashing or lockups that weren’t caused by bad overclocking attempts. As expected, MSI has put out a stable motherboard platform.

Here is the system setup and benchmarks used during the coming benchmarks. Note that we are using Windows XP Professional final and the new NVIDIA 22.40 Detonator drivers with my GeForce 3 video card.

Test System Setup
CPU 1 x 1.53 GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Processor
Motherboards MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU
Shuttle AK31 Rev3
nForce Reference Board
Memory 1 x 256MB TwinMOS PC2100 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE
Video Card GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 22.40
Operating System Windows XP

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
Sysmark 2001

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