Overclocking the Modules

Now to our favourite part, overclocking. With Core i7, overclocking is an interesting process in itself. We are still trying to master it; however, we have achieved some impressive results already.

For our A-DATA kit we were limited to 1.65v as we don't want to damage the CPU and this is what most users will not want to risk either, so we limit 1.65v for memory. To this end we managed to push the memory to a max of 1520MHz, however we had to reduce the timings to 8-8-8-20 to get it stable at 1.65v. At 1333MHz we had 1.6v for 7-7-7-20, so it's good to know that it will work at its designed speeds below 1.65v.

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.