Overclocking

When I first tried to overclock this board I was surprised by how far the FSB would go. After some investigation, I noticed, that once you set the FSB to a value bigger than 290 MHz in the BIOS, the BIOS would always set 290.7 MHz, no matter what value you selected. Now, when you reduce the FSB again, the board does not change it until you power off the system, then power it back on - a reset does not help.
When the FSB is "stuck", software tools can not change the FSB either. The chipset reports it back as changed, but it never actually changes as above screenshot shows.

Another problem we experienced a lot, is that if your overclock is unstable and the BIOS can not complete the POST, it will reboot and report the CMOS settings as corrupted, so they are back to their defaults. This tends to get annoying after a while because you have to change back every setting.

We are working together with ECS to resolve this issues. For our overclocking testing, we set the FSB to 280 in the BIOS (outside the 290 MHz "sticky" range), once in Windows, SysTool is used to set the FSB to whatever is needed. This works perfectly fine, it is just a bit unconvenient.



In order to find out the overclocking potential of the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, we put a Dangerden TDX waterblock on our CPU and set the multiplier to 4x with a memory divider of 2:1. This is to make sure that neither the CPU nor the memory are limiting our overclock here.

A maximum FSB of 352 MHz is not too great, but it is definitely good enough for most overclockers.



For a more real-world overclocking score we left the multiplier at 9x and slowly increased the FSB. Since our memory can not run that fast, we had to drop the memory ratio to 2:3 which means the memory was running at DDR400 while the CPU ran at 2700 MHz. The board was no limiting factor here at any time, the CPU's limit is 2700 MHz, sometimes when the water is cool a few MHz more.

A few more overclocking options in the BIOS would definitely be nice, especially more options to tweak memory timings, of which the Athlon64 has a lot.