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On your left is your Hardware Monitor menu where
you can check your temps and fan speeds. On the right, you can load your
default settings. Note the "Load System Turbo Settings" option.
Selecting this option will automatically set your memory to its most
aggressive settings.
Overclocking
The Albatron PX845PEV Pro is an overclock
friendly motherboard. Why do I say this? Well, it has one great
little feature overclockers will find most useful.
Watch Dog Timer
This special feature is used to detect when the
system is unable to boot using the manual over-clocking configurations.
So if you unsuccessfully overclock your system, you won't need to open up your
case and reach for that CMOS jumper or battery! It will reboot and will
reset back to its default settings. Great isn't it? But how
exactly does this work? Well, after you power on the system, BIOS will
check the last system POST status. If it was successful, BIOS will
enable the Watch Dog Timer feature and set the CPU frequency values to the
user configured values stored in the BIOS. If unsuccessful, the Watch
Dog Timer will reboot the system.
Now let's take a closer look at what
overclocking options the BIOS has to offer:
Memory Tweaking
**click to enlarge**
Under your advanced chipset features menu, you
can easily tweak your memory. From here you can manually adjust your
memory to run at CAS2 and adjust your Active to Precharge Delay, DRAM RAS to
CAS delay and DRAM RAS Precharge.
Frequency/Voltage Control
Ahh, now this is the screen you'll be dealing
with most.
You can make adjustments as follows:
Bus Speeds: 100 - 248MHz (in 1MHz
increments)
Core Voltages Supported: 1.85V Maximum(in 0.025V increments)
DRAM Voltages Supported: 2.8V Maximum (in 0.1V increments)
One neat setting here is the ability to lock your AGP/PCI
frequency at 66Mhz/33Mhz So as you start to increase your CPU frequency,
you'll stay at a fixed 66Mhz/33Mhz bus speed.
Results
We were able to successfully overclock our
2.4Ghz P4 @ 2.8Ghz. Not bad! Considering we were using the stock Intel
Heatsink/Fan. You'll need to play with these a bit to find your peak.
After a few hours of playing with it, I was able to run the memory in "Turbo
Mode", giving us DDR speed of 413 using a stick of Corsair XMS3200. The
screenshot above will show you what our peak settings were. They are as
follows:
CPU Voltage: 1.75
CPU Host Frequency: 155
Fixed AGP/PCI speed: 66Mhz/33Mhz
DDR:CPU Ratio: 2.66x (Turbo Mode)
DDR Speed: 413M
AGP Voltage: 1.5
DDR Voltage: 2.7
Now my room get's VERY hot so the CPU and Northbridge heatsinks were hot to the touch.
I'm sure with some better cooling, we would be able to achieve much greater
results.
Overall, the Albatron PX845PEV Pro is a great
overclocking board. It should satisfy even the most hardcore overclocker.
We will push this board to its limit with an upcoming project that is in the
works. Stay tuned!
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