BIOS and Overclocking

Being based on nVidia's nForce 650i chipset, there is a BIOS layout set out by nVidia to gain "Designed by nVidia" credentials. ECS has followed the NV BIOS setup quite well. Award 6.0 modular BIOS is used as the base. All overclocking features are located under the Advanced Chipset Features menu with various sub menus where the major features are located.

Frequencies

FSB (QDR): 400MHz to 2500MHz in 1MHz Increments

Mem (DDR): 400MHz to 1400MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCI-E: 100MHz to 131MHz in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

CPU Core: 0.850v to 1.60v in 0.025v Increments

CPU FSB: 1.2v to 1.4v in 0.05v Increments

Memory: 1.8v to 2.2v in 0.05v Increments

nForce SPP: 1.2v to 1.5v in 0.05v Increments

Overclocking

Our overclocking tests were quite good considering there wasn't a huge amount of tweaking to be had in terms of voltages and we are working with a motherboard that is considerably cheaper than most other boards in the nForce 6xx series.

Using BIOS version 07/03/07 which is the latest from the ECS website, we managed to hit 466MHz (1864MHz QDR) FSB quite happily and we are fairly pleased with the result, all things considered. Sure, it's much lower than the maximum we've seen from some boards (500MHz+) but attainable FSB is still quite high and will keep basic overclockers happy.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we don't have enough time to tweak the motherboard to the maximum and find the highest possible FSB as this could take days to properly find. 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 or "burn in" time might come into play if you believe in that.