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 MSI K7N420 Pro motherboard was a mixed blessing. In all honesty, the options needed for the best overclocking experience where simply not there. The number of front-side bus settings that are available are limited to things like 100, 105, 106, 111, 114, 133, 137, 140, 145, 147, 154 and 157. As you might guess, this kind of FSB incrementing isn’t what the hardcore overclocker is looking for in a motherboard. To add to the troubles, there are no multiplier adjustments on the motherboard either. Rejoicing may commence, as there is the ability to switch between CAS 2.5 and CAS 2 memory latency.The overclocking on the board, even with just the front-side bus adjustments, wasn’t very successful. Going past the 140 MHz setting left me with some very mixed feelings. We could post without a problem at 140 MHz, but the 145 MHz setting gave us stability issues that just didn’t seemed to be able to get ironed out. It can be easily said, this board is definitely not for the overclocker.
The testing setup for this motherboard was changed a bit. I had been getting some odd numbers with a new version of Win XP Professional I purchased, so the Soyo Dragon motherboard was retested along with the NVIDIA reference board to match up against the results from the MSI K7N420 Pro motherboard.
Below are the system setup and the benchmarks that were run:
| CPU | 1 x 1.67 GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Processor |
| Motherboards |
MSI K7N420 Pro Soyo Dragon Plus KT266A |
| 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
