Overclocking

The KA7 - Another typical overclocker?

We've seen all the hype about the KA7 and just how great a motherboard it is for overclocking. Honestly, going into the overclocking phase of testing we took it all with a grain of salt. We've tried overclocking with our trusty Athlon 750 with many different Athlon motherboards, and each time, the CPU hasn't had much success with adjusting the front side bus speed.

With the KA7, this has changed.

If you recall our K7V review, the highest bus speed we were able to overclock the exact same Athlon 750 was 105MHz. With the K7 Pro, we managed a measly 102MHz. Lets just say with the KA7 we've shattered those numbers! Before we dish out the final results however, lets talk a bit about the overclocking features present on this motherboard.

First of all, the KA7 supports a wide variety of bus speeds, 100 to 155MHz in 1MHz increments to be exact. Secondly, CPU Pull Up Strength and CPU Drive Strength can be adjusted with this motherboard, we'll discuss the overclocking potential with these settings shortly.

More overclocking settings

The KA7 also supports CPU voltage manipulation; voltages ranging from 1.3V to 2.0V in 0.5 increments are supported on the KA7 depending on the type of Athlon used. (Specifically for 1.6V Athlons, the BIOS allows voltage manipulation up to 1.8V, 1.7V Athlon up to 1.9V, and 1.8V Athlon voltages up to 2.0V)

Abit chose to limit the voltage on 1.6V and 1.7V Athlons to prevent end users from damaging their CPU by setting their voltage too high. I/O voltage can also be adjusted: settings range from 3.2V to 3.9V.

So how high were we able to clock our Athlon 750? 800MHz? Nope. 850MHz? Nope again - we were able to go higher than that! Lets discuss the experience:

Overclocking results

Originally, we were able to run the system stable at 915MHz. While we were certainly pleased with these results we still felt we could achieve higher clock speeds.

It turns out, we were right! This time we were able to overclock our Athlon 750 CPU to 923MHz! (7.5x123) Of course, 8MHz isn't a significant step up, but we were still pretty proud of our results. We did break the 6000 mark in 3DMark after all. (more on this later)

To experiment we also threw in our reference GeForce 2 GTS board. Unfortunately, our new found clock speed didn't agree with the card and tests were abruptly halted after Quake 3 testing. Our GeForce DDR reference board worked just fine though.

We were still able to hit higher clock speeds by adjusting the CPU drive and pull strength, but just couldn't complete our entire battery of tests. We think a little more voltage might have made the difference, but we definitely respect Abit's decision to limit the voltages based on the model of your Athlon CPU.