ECS KN1SLI Extreme (nVidia nForce4 SLI)
Overclocking and stability
Let's take a look at the power converter. It uses a 3-phase power scheme in which there are six 1800 mkF, three 1500 mkF, and three 1000 mkF capacitors.
To improve cooling of the power supply module, engineers at ECS have installed an additional cooling system with a 40 mm fan. Due to that, hot air is blown outside the housing and it runs quietly enough.
We now move on to the overclocking features which are not gathered in a separate section but in the "BIOS Advanced Features" section.
First off, ECS KN1SLI Extreme allows adjusting the system bus speed within 200 to 400 MHz in 1 MHz increments. You can't enter the required value directly, so you have to scroll through all the interim values.
Another item is the feature for changing the processor's multiplier.
The adjustment range is within 4 to 11 (maximum for the 3500+ model), in 0.5 increments. Actually, the usefulness of such feature is quite doubtful since all Athlon64 processors offer the multiplier locked towards increase.
The next item deals with raising the processor voltage (Vcore) by 375V in 25V increments.
Then - the user can raise voltage on the memory.
The Vmem adjustment range varies within 2.55V to 3.11V in 0.08V increments.
There is another useful feature for adjusting the HyperTransport bus multiplier:
The thing is, as the reference HT frequency goes up (or, simply FSB), to preserve the operational stability the resultant HT frequency should be at about 1 GHz. As a result, as the FSB speed reaches 250 MHz, we have to reduce the HT multiplier to 4 (when setting the FSB speed to about 300 MHz, the multiplier = 3). Many users ignore this fine point and come across problems in overclocking. But engineers at ECS proactively introduced the Auto parameter (which is default, by the way), so the board itself does the job of reducing the HT multiplier to the required value. Also, you should not be afraid of the low HT multiplier since its influence on the overall performance is minimum.
Now on to the practical overclocking. The board showed quite poor results: a stable operation at frequencies no more than 255 MHz.
However, further raise of the frequency resulted in a loss of operating stability (both in the synchronous and asynchronous mode).
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