Fan Noise

There are no active fans on the ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2, so there is no fan noise.

Overclocking

Intel's i945 chipsets have an overclocking lock which requires you to raise the PCI-E bus clock to get above 220 FSB (more info in the overclocking section of the ABIT AL8 review).

Unfortunately the PCI-E bus can not be increased indefinitely. At one point the SATA harddisks disappear and further on the video card no longer initializes.



This is the maximum clock we could get out of the ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2. Definitely nothing spectacular. However, using a CPU with a high multiplier you should be able to get some good OC scores. For example get a dirt cheap Celeron 326 (2.53 GHz) which has a x19 multiplier. 255 x 19 = max. 4845 MHz . So the board will not limit you here and you can easily go for the limits of the CPU.