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.
I told you that I would cover the overclocking of the ECS K7VTA3 motherboard here on this page. I am sorry to report that ECS didn’t include any options for overclocking your processor on this particular board. This is a shame because it immediately alienates a large portion of the market they are trying to get into with this particular motherboard.After speaking with several ECS reps at the recent Comdex show, I was informed that they were in fact looking into better, and more overclocker friendly bios’ and motherboards. While no one could give me any kind of general idea of a date, they did imply that there was the possibility of being a release of bios for the K7VTA3 Rev2 to activate these options. However, I would not buy this board with that being your final reasoning.
Future motherboards from ECS, such as the K7S6A based on the SiS 745 chipset, are going to have a lot more options in this field.
Unlike most of the other manufacturers of motherboards for the DIY market, ECS does not have plans to include IDE RAID on any of their motherboards.
Here is the system setup for the benchmarks that follow:
| CPU | 1 x 1.53 GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Processor |
| Motherboards |
ECS K7VTA3 Rev2 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
