Overclocking

Overclocking is something we always enjoy here; not only does it show just how much time each motherboard manufacturer puts into their boards, but also shows if the effort pays off.

GIGABYTE Overclocking With DES Advanced Disabled

Here we see a very impressive FSB and CPU overclock; we managed 571MHz FSB and 3.85GHz on the CPU which was as stable as we could get it.

GIGABYTE Overclocking With DES Advanced Enabled

Now we see that the board takes a dive in overclocking. While DES Advanced does help power savings, it doesn't give the CPU enough power to really overclock to its limits. However, at 3.7GHz and a 551MHz FSB, we were still quite impressed.

ASUS Overclocking With EPU 6 Disabled

With EPU 6 disabled we managed to hit an impressive 564MHz FSB. Until the EP45 Extreme hit the market, this was the fastest DDR2 board we saw. Checking for max clock speeds, we managed to hit 3.79GHz which is just about on par with what our GIGABYTE board managed to give us.

ASUS Overclocking with EPU 6 Enabled

Enabling EPU 6 gives the board a hit, taking it down to a 552MHz FSB. We see that the energy savings from both competitors give around the same clock and FSB rates.

MSI Overclocking with DrMOS Disabled

With DrMOS disabled we get quite a bit of an FSB change between the MSI board and the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards. However, the clock speeds are still pretty high. The ASUS board and GIGABYTE board are the top contenders, though.

MSI Overclocking with DrMOS Enabled

With DrMOS enabled the overclocking function takes a bit of a hit, but not as much as we expected.