Abit NF7 @ HardOCP

Zitat

Overclocking

Certainly ABIT is known for their OC features on boards and this one is not lacking in that area, but surely being able to execute all those tweaks flawlessly is most important.


Shown above is our max stable FSB OC at 184MHz. Be advised that this very system (different mainboard obviously) has run a stable at 200MHz+ FSB. With our first BIOS that was delivered with the board, we could only secure a 168MHz FSB overclock. With the flashing of a new beta BIOS, we could instantly use the same settings and reach a 184MHz rate.

Keep in mind that the scores we have shown are from a synchronous memory and front side bus. We did however de-tweak the system in order to remove stress from other system components even though they had shown to be stable at much faster speeds. Still with no amount of trying were we able to move past our 184MHz FSB. We are not the only ones that I have seen this happen to as well. Hexus met the same boundary.

It is my gut feeling that this board is being held back by its BIOS and not the chipset for sure. Maybe it is board engineering itself, but it seems to us that the BIOS is keeping us from moving past 184MHz. Maybe it is a PCI/BIOS issue that is holding us back, but when we confronted ABIT engineers with this, they explained that the PCI bus was locked at 33MHz and could not be changed. Still at 185MHz FSB, our system would boot fine, but hard lock at the first sign of disk activity. Same was true of 200MHz FSB...