Just about every review site has taken a unique approach to motherboard testing at one time or another, especially when it comes to overclocking. Over the last few months, we have taken a slightly different approach with the performance-oriented motherboards by offering additional technical information and a few BIOS guides to help end-users set up the ever more complicated BIOS functions that are available on today's boards. Our primary directive is to ensure everything we achieve in the cozy confines of the labs is fully repeatable with the same off-the-shelf retail components and settings.
The basic test criteria we use when overclocking the Intel (
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3239#) enthusiast boards is setting FSB speeds in the 400-465FSB region. We ensure tRD is set as low as possible while keeping component voltages to a minimum level for stable long-term use. This type of overclocking might not sound very sexy - Patrick Swayze would dump us fast for not doing the Argentine tango with high FSB rates. However, our recent forays into dissecting DDR2 and DDR3-based motherboard overclocking have shown that tRD (Read Delay) is the most important tunable BIOS option available to the overclocker when seeking measureable performance improvements when overclocking Core 2 processors.
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S*ource: Anandtech (
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3239)*
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