The BIOS

Now it comes down to the BIOS and here the board uses an AMI Megatrends BIOS that is designed to look like the Award Modular 6. From our experiences, this type of BIOS tends to be a bit more problematic with overclocking as it either lacks features or has ones that don't work properly.

The bulk of the overclocking features are found under the Power User Overclock settings where you can change the reference clock and PCI-E clocks. Now, while this board does have what looks like a vcore setting, it doesn't really do much; we couldn't get it to overclock much at all.

However, this review isn't aimed at the board itself; we are purely here to test the difference between DDR2 and DDR3 on the AMD platform.

To change the memory settings and other reference clocks you need to navigate to the Advanced Chipset Features where you can change memory speed and even overclock the IGP if you so desire.

Overclocking

Overclocking wasn't the aim here. We will come back and visit this later on as time permits. As we are simply wanting to test DDR2 vs. DDR3 on the AM3 platform, for that we kept things at stock speeds with DDR3 running at 1333MHz, the max that AMD supports. The DDR2 is set at 1066MHz which is again the max DDR2 memory speed that AM2+ supports (which is the same memory controller on the AM3).

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.