FSB Overclocking Results

For FSB overclocking, the following setup was used on the Epox 8KRA2+:

Front Side Bus Overclocking Testbed
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core)
CPU Vcore: 1.650V (default)
Cooling: Volcano 7+ HSF
Power Supply: Enermax 350W

Using the above overclocking setup we were able to reach a stable FSB overclock of 215MHz. Since the 8KRA2+ only supports a 1/6 PCI divider the AGP and PCI buses were running out of spec (66MHz/33MHz), which limited our potential FSB overclock. We wouldn’t be surprised if a 215MHz FSB overclock using a similar setup is about the best you’ll be able to get from motherboards based on the KT600 chipset, especially since Epox Socket A motherboards are usually at the very top of the FSB overclocking heap. As a reference, we’ve been able to easily reach over 220MHz FSB with several nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards, due in part to the ability of these motherboards to lock the AGP and PCI buses. AGP/PCI bus locking is commonplace now and is what will continue to hold back VIA chipset-based motherboards from winning over overclocker’s hearts.

Epox 8KRA2+: BIOS and Overclocking Epox 8KRA2+: Stress Testing
Comments Locked

14 Comments

View All Comments

  • Anonymous User - Friday, July 25, 2003 - link

    What about stability? Does it perform better than Nforce2 400? same as KT400A does compared to Nforce2?
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, July 19, 2003 - link

    What about ECC memory support. A mobo that offers RAID w/o ECC is useless!.bh.
  • Anonymous User - Friday, July 18, 2003 - link

    You complain about the AGP/PCI bus being out of spec. It's a whole 2.5/pci and 5 mhz AGP out of spec. I don't know of any hardware that would have a problem at those speeds. You either ran out of headroom with the chip or the board just won't go past 215-220 or so. Hopefully you'll find out with other KT600 test boards.
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, July 12, 2003 - link

    It's just strange because right after he says he still highly recommends the board, he goes on to suggest that people buy an Nforce2 board if they can afford it. I don't know why he would highly recommend a board with "mediocre" performance.
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, July 12, 2003 - link

    I don't see why this board is still "highly recommended" after all the negative comments regarding the board.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, July 10, 2003 - link

    Guess some few points were missing in the review: Performance of integrated LAN, IDE and Audio. Remember that nForce2 has a very low CPU utilization in all these three groups. Also the comparison of Audio DSP, 3D sound, ... were missing.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link

    including the older kt400 series results would be nice...
  • Zuni - Sunday, July 6, 2003 - link

    Almost every large website worldwide uses flash. Nba.com, cnet.com,zdnet.com etc almost every ad these days is in flash. Most of the larger sites use flash for navigation and other fancy effects. We're just using it for graphing :)
  • Zuni - Sunday, July 6, 2003 - link

    Err smaller in size :)
  • Zuni - Sunday, July 6, 2003 - link

    The reason they are in flash is bandwidth, they are over 50% small in size. We hear your feedback though.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now