Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4 650i SLI ReviewOverclocking
Now, when it's time to test the overclocking capability of this motherboard, I ventured to bring cooling out of the equation by placing a strong Delta 80mm Fan to blow across the board's chipset area.
The maximum I could bring my E4300 to was 417MHz FSB. At first I was kind of disappointed with this limited FSB on the CPU, but I do know that this CPU does not tend to overclock well on it's FSB across many boards. One factor was the 200FSB Strap of it.
So I tried to do a 266FSB Strap mod to trick the board into recognizing it as a 266FSB Default CPU, but this board does not work with the mod, still recognizing the default FSB as 200MHz.
Hopefully Gigabyte's newer BIOS for the board will start recognizing Straps via the LGA configuration of the processor and not by hard memorizing according to model numbers.
Not willing to stop here, I put on my X6800 Conroe and tried out the overclocking again.
Without any mods at all, I took this motherboard up to 520MHz FSB!! This far surpasses ALL the NVIDIA Chipset motherboards I've tried so far, including the 680i SLI ones. To find one that does over 500MHz is rare, much less to say finding it on a mid-range 650i board! The good news is that this board is not a media sample but one from retail shelves! Now, there's a trick to get the motherboard overclocking so high - two huge factors will affect the distance you go on this board: Northbridge Voltage and the FSB/Memory relationship. After 400MHz FSB, the EasyTune 5 utility doesn't work good any more, it freezes up the system just when I try to change clocks.
First, I went into BIOS to tune up the voltages, to the configuration you see below:
The NB/HTT Voltage will help tremendously on this motherboard, it scales very well with this voltage. At default, the board puts a measured 1.25v into the Northbridge chipset and raising it to +0.35v sets a real voltage of 1.6v, which helps your FSB overclocking a lot. You will also want to set LDT Frequency to 4x.
And finally the FSB/Memory config that will make it or break it. After 420MHz FSB, the board will overclock much better with 1:1 setting, which is normally derived by selecting Linked - Sync. However, this may not always work well because sometimes this board tend to round-down the Memory Frequency, which may end up trying to boot up not in 1:1 mode. To overcome this, simply compensate by adding 2MHz over the Memory Frequency you want to run, by choosing Unlinked. Let's say you want to run 480MHz FSB, so 1:1 would mean running your Memory at 480 x 2 = 960MHz FSB. So you choose Unlink, key in 480 for FSB and 960 + 2 = 962 for Memory, instead of 960. Below shows what I set to get 520MHz FSB.
