Over-clockable Motherboards

Only two of the Athlon motherboards offer any type of over-clocking options. The MSI motherboard offers the ability to set the front side bus (FSB) to either 100MHz or 133MHz. Besides the fact that the AMD Northbridge doesn't support a 133MHz speed this setting is pretty useless unless you find it likely that for example a 500MHz Athlon processor (best case scenario) can handle a 165MHz frequency increase without the aid of super cooling technology.

The ASUS K7M motherboard BIOS provides a plethora of FSB settings including 90MHz, 95MHz and 100MHz to 150MHz! I tried running the board at various FSB settings. Besides running SYSmark98 I also ran each FSB setting through several game demos to make sure the AGP bus was stable. The best I could get with an AGP based video adaptor installed in my platform was a FSB of 104MHz. This pushed my 700MHz Athlon to 735MHz. The limiting factor seemed to be the AGP bus. I had to plug in several V770U's before the system would run stable through my 3D game test suite. The same held true when I used a 500MHz Athlon processor. With an AGP adaptor installed, 104MHz (Athlon 520MHz) was all she wrote.

I was curious to see if the AGP bus was indeed holding back my over-clocking efforts so I installed a PCI based TNT2. Sure enough I was able to boost the FSB an additional 4MHz to 108MHz. This gave my 500MHz Athlon an increase to 540MHz. Not bad at all. The ASUS K7M offers by far the best over-clockability.

Here is a screenshot of the ASUS K7M "Advanced Chipset Setup" where you can select the FSB frequency & memory timings.