ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI for Overclockers

The developers of high-end chipsets have recently started claiming that their solutions are specifically optimized for overclocking. The two products we are talking about today are also no exceptions.

It is quite natural that the developers care about overclocking fans that much: computer enthusiasts is exactly the user group that will always buy the most expensive hardware for their needs. Therefore, ATI and Nvidia do their best to get overclockers interested in their new solutions.

At the same time, it is important to understand that this notorious optimization doesn’t really mean anything. The new chipset can affect the overclocking results only indirectly. The major factors that are essential for successful overclocking are processor, graphics card and system memory. And as for the mainboard and chipset, the best they can do is not to impose any limitations. This should be exactly what the chipset developers are trying to say here: their solutions will not be a bottleneck during overclocking experiments, they will allow to reveal the processor, graphics card and memory potential to the full extent. In other words, ATI and Nvidia guarantee that the boards based on ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI will allow you to easily increase the clock generator frequency, memory bus frequency and maybe even HyperTransport and PCI Express bus frequencies. However, it is also very important to understand that the time and effort spent by ATI and Nvidia engineers may be very easily diminished by some mainboard developers, who may not do a good job adding the necessary overclocking friendly options into the BIOS Setup and implementing them properly.

Luckily, the mainboards we reviewed this time turned out to be very well and thoroughly designed. They both boasted great set of overclocking friendly functions, which proved that ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI are really well-designed to satisfy the overclocking needs of some hardware enthusiasts.

Both mainboards, ATI Sturgeon and ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe, allowed changing the clock generator frequency in very wide range; setting higher processor Vcore, Vmem and Vchipset; managing all latencies and memory settings; adjusting the clock frequency multipliers for the CPU and HyperTransport bus. In other words, both mainboards proved ideal for overclocking. And our practical experiments proved it once again. When we set the HyperTransport frequency multiplier to 3x, the maximum clock generator frequency without losing the system stability reached 338MHz for ATI Sturgeon and 340MHz for ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe. It should be more than enough for successful overclocking of any Socket AM2 CPU out there.

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe

ATI Sturgeon

Moreover, the screenshots above indicate that both mainboards also allow very impressive absolute CPU overclocking, so that the processors end up running at very high frequencies.

Note that when Nvidia mentions special overclocking friendly functions they also imply their LinkBoost technology and SLI-Ready Memory with EPP. However, these technologies cannot really improve overclocking by themselves, and they can only make it easier. The first technology mentioned above offers to automatically increase the performance of the bus between the chipset bridges and the PCI Express x16 bus, while the second technology sets the most optimal memory timings (from the manufacturers standpoint) for the installed memory. So, these opportunities should be of primary interest to commencing overclockers, while real enthusiasts will definitely prefer to adjust all the settings on their own.