Overclocking

Cooling

In toying around with the board, we ended up pulling off the snazzy looking chipset fan. When we felt the fan and heatsink, we were a bit startled. The setup does look nice, but we’re more concerned over whether MSI compromised heat conductivity for looks. If you take a look at the heatsink you’ll notice that it has no fins whatsoever. Fortunately the chipset itself doesn’t need too much cooling to begin with. This turned out to be a non-issue, but it did have us a little scared for a few minutes.

Swank looking fa

A quick inspection of the board shows that the KT3 has four total fan headers. One is reserved for the CPU fan, and the other for the chipset fan. This leaves two more for extra cooling. This should work out just fine, should you need more cooling, there are numerous companies that make fans that attach to the power connectors that work with your hard drives.

Overclocking

We tried our darndest to punch this board up to anything and we were thwarted at every attempt. In trying to use unlocked processors we failed utterly. Using everything from a Duron to an Athlon XP we came up short. Whenever we tried to change the multiplier the system would cease to boot until we cleared the CMOS and let the defaults run. With the multiplier adjustment rendered useless, we could only overclock via the FSB. We managed to get out 1800+ running on a 142MHz FSB. Not exactly a spectacular achievement, but this has more to do with the CPU than anything else.

A funny thing happened…

While trying to overclock we tried all sorts of things; one of the tricks in our bag was the BIOS update. At this point in time we had not run any 166MHz memory tests. Thinking nothing of it, we wanted to get to the fun stuff – overclocking. We proceeded to overclock but failed miserably at the multiplier scene. After sorting stuff out there, we went onto running a few of the numbers for the 166MHz scene. We weren’t expecting much, but the scores had actually gone down by a few frames on the lower resolutions. A little curious we reran a few of the 133MHz numbers; to our dismay the numbers were even lower. We could only attribute this to the BIOS update. Curiously enough, MSI does not have the old BIOS posted on their website. Consequently, we didn’t have enough time to rerun the numbers to show a valid set of 166MHz numbers. In theory, they would most likely have been the same as the 133MHz numbers.