EPoX 4PDA5+ Review - Overclocking
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Since my Soltek 86SPE-L couldn't POST at any Front Side Bus (FSB) speed higher than 270 MHz using any divider, I was eager to overclock this motherboard. Knowing my processor will probably do a bit more than 3.2 GHz on air cooling, I was hoping I could go higher. The BIOS lets you type in a FSB value between 200 and 350 MHz, so there is plenty of headroom.
Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems getting higher than 240 FSB. It seems that the Aggressive Memory Mode, designed to make interactions between the chipset and the memory even faster than normal, was getting in the way so I had to relax it from its Max setting to Standard. I also had to add more voltage to the RAM, pushing my Infineon to 2.9 V. Finally, I had to relax the divider from an automatic setting (at 240 MHz, the BIOS would have used a 5:4 divider) to 3:2, or 6:4 as is written in the BIOS. I also could not get the CMOS overclocking failure restore feature to work consistently. According to EPoX, if the motherboard detects an overclocking failure beyond a certain point in the POST process, I could press Insert to reset the CMOS to more relaxed settings (200FSB, 1:1 divider for 2.4 GHz, and voltages reset). I could not get this feature to work consistently, but its possible I was able to POST past the motherboard's ability to detect a failure.
Having said that, the motherboard came with a default Vdimm of 2.8 V. I'm not sure why EPoX started with this, but I suspect that the board undervolts its components slightly. At the time of writing this, I currently have the BIOS set to give the CPU 1.625 V, but CPU-Z and the Universal System Diagnostic Manager (USDM) from EPoX both say that the Vcore is 1.616 V.
Measuring temperatures can be interesting too if you didn't know what the USDM is, since Motherboard Monitor doesn't know about this board and setting it to read the 4PDA5+ like a 4PDA2+ told me that the CPU temperature was 88-degrees C and the system temp was 51-degrees C when the BIOS consistently read 39-degrees C for the CPU and 31-degrees C for the system.
Incrementing in 5 MHz steps, I was able to take the system to 285 MHz using a 3:2 divider and 2.5-4-4-8 memory timings. I was able to boot the computer at this speed, but Windows refused to start at 290 FSB. The computer was highly unstable at 285 and 280, so I ended up with With Windows not starting I was wondering what more I could do, but I think I will need to obtain better memory, heatspreaders for my Infineon RAM, or possibly a water cooling system to go higher.
In short, I think there's more to be had from this board, and I couldn't max it out once I figured out what I needed to do to get past the 240 MHz barrier.
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