Overclocking
Here we take a look at the overclocking ability of the Albatron K8X800 ProII. Keep in mind that the results are from our configuration here at PCPerspective, so you may get better or worse results depending on your own hardware.
The Athlon 64 3200+ we have been using for this review does not like to be overclocked very much. The limit appears to be under 2200MHz which isn’t much of a gain from the 2000Mhz default, but it should still give you a good sense of what to expect from the motherboard.
Overclocking the Albatron K8X800 ProII is rather limited. Because it is a non-Pro chipset, it does not have a AGP/PCI frequency lock, nor does it have adjustable HyperTransport ratios. Combine this with the fact the CPU multiplier does not work on the Albatron K8X800 ProII you have yourself a traditional overclocking situation — only FSB overclocking.
So using only the FSB as my overclock, I managed to get the system up and stable at 217MHz for a 2170MHz total.
DiVX Encoding
A nice stair pattern here with roughly 40 seconds shaved off the stock encoding time. This translates into 6.5 minutes saved for a 2 hour movie which isn’t much since the stock performance was already impressive.
Doom 3
As with all overclocking tests I’ve run in the past few months, here we see barely any improvement in the average frame rate. However, overclocking does manage to improve the minimum frame rate to 20 FPS which is still low, but better than 15 FPS at Stock.
Need for Speed: Underground 2
In Need for Speed: Underground 2, we see no real improvement in average frame rates, but a good boost to the minimum. A 29 FPS minimum makes the game run a lot smoother.
Multipliers on the K8X800 ProII
Originally we intended to publish this article earlier but ran into the issue of the multiplier. So we chose to delay in favour of gathering more information about this problem before posting. First off, I knew that this CPU was good for overclocking since it worked fine on the Abit KV8 Pro we reviewed here, so why did this particular motherboard have problems with multipliers? I was hoping someone knew the answer.
I posted in various forums (including the official Albatron forums ) and read many Albatron K8X800 ProII reviews. Regardless of what was recommended, nothing seemed to work. BIOS relases didn’t seem to have an effect either (tried v1.02, v1.09, v1.10, v1.12). From the K8X800 ProII reviews I have read, there are some reviews that have successfully used the multiplier to overclock as high as 245MHz, while some other sites have had no luck at all.
Our results here on PCPerspective are mixed. We can overclock successfully using the FSB, but unable to change the multiplier even though it is a feature available in the BIOS. We have tried multiple BIOS releases and none have fixed the multiplier.
I firmly believe that this problem we have here is isolated because there are many customers who have been using their boards happily overclocked.
