Overclocking Performance:

Here’s a look at how we conduct our overclocking performance tests on various boards. We start by overclocking our system in 5Mhz increments and slowly increase the frequency of the microprocessors as well the memory as need be. After overclocking the board in small increments, we boot back to Windows and run our regular suite of gaming stress tests to make sure the system is stable before continuing further. As long as the system passes our Aquamark3, 3Dmark01, UT2004, Far Cry, Halo and Doom III tests, we consider the system to be stable enough to continue testing. We then head back to the BIOS to make necessary changes (such as memory timings) and continue with our overclocking tests. After each attempt, the system is rebooted and put through rigorous assessments to ensure its stability. When we finally reach the potential of the motherboard, we go back to the BIOS, alter any settings we feel could limit the motherboard’s overclocking attempts and downclock a little bit to reach a stable point. When we reach another peak point, we generally move the bus speeds in one MHz increments to get the best overclock possible. And of course, once we have found the limit of the board, we continue to run stress tests on it to confirm system stability. The testbed is the same throughout the testing process with an exception of IDE and SATA drives. Since SATA drives have a tendency to limit overclocking, we usually use IDE drives in our tests, thereby, finding the true capabilities of the board.

We always prefer to use IDE drives for overclocking tests and with that, we managed to get a solid 242MHz overclock. With our Seagate SATA drive, however, we only got to 227MHz. This shows an increase of 21 percent above default with IDE drive and an increase of 13.5 percent with SATA drives. We did lower the multiplier to 9 in order to retail the aforementioned overclocking yields. Overall, the overclocking tests were fairly close to what the Abit KV8 Pro with VIA’s K8T800 Pro chipset had to offer. Thus far, there isn’t much different between the two chipset except in features. Maybe the difference will become more distinct once we take a look at the performance numbers.