Article: Overclocking Intel® Desktop Board D865GSA
Many thanks to Intel® for providing the board.
I. Introduction
I have reviewed this before in July and I didn't cover overclocking the board, primarily, I never have enough time. But having a few quality spare time in last month allowed me to get back to the board and play with it.
I will go straight to the point, this motherboard is not designed to be an overclocker. Nor is this a performance board, this is a value board designed to give low-budget consimers a chace to own a PC without breaking the wallet. This is also a board that will allow upgrading to newer socket but still allowing older components such as AGP video cards, IDE peripherals, and DDR1 memory to be used. And in this one-pager update, I will not go thru any more hullaballo and just go straight to my findings.
II. Overclocking
This board failed to overclock dual-core processor (in my possession) in an acceptable manner. The lack of secondary 12v rail may have contributed to this factor, since a Pressler 2.8GHz will only budge 10MHz in FSB (or 3.08GHz in clock frequency). However, all is not lost since this board is very capable when used with single-core processor. Check out the CPU-Z below:
Processor based on 533MHz (133MHz) Bus
A very healthy increase in FSB, from the stock 133MHz, the motherboard is able to push it till 195FSB. I doubt anyone will complain about it! But remember that my processor is an ES and has the multiplier dropped to 14 to ensure that CPU will not be the wall. Now let's try one more time....
Processor based on 800MHz (200MHz) Bus
I am targetting for 250FSB but the CPU conks out. I'm quite sure the motherboard can do more. It's not bad to reach 245FSB though. It is amazing how this little affordable motherboard can do so much if only they knew the trick in tweaking it. If anyone would like to know how this is done, just ring my bell. Till next time!