After 12 hours of Prime'ing, I've considered my current setup to be stable. Although whether or not that's entirely true remains to be seen. However, the road to this setup wasn't without any snags. So here I'll document some of my initial experiences as well as my personal findings.
It's a little odd that there aren't many vendors selling this particular board. The amount of things included in this model is rather interesting, as it includes the Power Pack kit that has a magnetic screwdriver 'pen' and a thermal probe. ZipZoomFly and MWave both carry this motherboard for decent prices although overall cheapest is from ZZF, if they have it in stock.
The board's design is just like what reviewers have mentioned: the power connectors are placed in odd/bad locations. Navigating the power cable may be troublesome but be sure that it extends long enough to reach it. Otherwise, you may find yourself shortchanged. Everything else looks normal, as to be expected when you go through so many motherboards over the past several years.
Skipping straight to the overclocking findings, I've previously used a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum to achieve a 2.4GHz clockspeed with the Athlon64 X2 3800+ processor. This may not seem much to you but it is a modest and simple overclock to gain additional performance out of one's processor. The processor's normal voltage is 1.40 as specified by their OPN documentation and markings. At stock speed, the processor runs as normal but I did not take into account of Prime'ing and Memtest86 to test its stability. Given that I have done this before on the previous motherboard at stock speed, I felt that it was not needed anyway.
I jumped straight to 2.4GHz by bumping the FSB to 240MHz, setting the HT multi to 4, and leaving the CPU voltage at default. It boots to Windows but failed Prime. Memtest86 showed no errors after 2 test runs. Looking at the BIOS, the CPU voltage can be incremented or decremented (up to -0.1v) in 0.025 steps. The first step showed slight improvement, but still failed when Prime'ing. At +0.05v, stability begins to show but unfortunately failed after some load was placed in addition to Prime'ing. Strangely, this failure was after a full session/run of playing Battlefield 2. However, the crash I had earlier when playing seem to be one of the signs that it wasn't truly stable, something that I didn't take into account before. Although that's just speculating.
As of now, the processor is now running with a +0.075v adjustment from stock voltage and 12 straight hours of Prime'ing returned no errors. This also includes using uTorrent for seeding, an X-chat session with 8 IRC networks connected, gaim, and Media Player Classic running an AVI on infinite loop during the 12 hour test period. While more can be done to place additional load, I do not see what else that can be done to possibly force any instability.
As additional information, memory clock was forced at DDR400 with no modifications to DRAM timings that the BIOS provide. No additional tweaks were made since then as the goal was to retain a 2.4GHz overclock with as little tweaking as possible. Temperatures were not taken yet as the system is slowly getting softwares reinstalled. I'll update as necessary to provide these information.
It's a little odd that there aren't many vendors selling this particular board. The amount of things included in this model is rather interesting, as it includes the Power Pack kit that has a magnetic screwdriver 'pen' and a thermal probe. ZipZoomFly and MWave both carry this motherboard for decent prices although overall cheapest is from ZZF, if they have it in stock.
The board's design is just like what reviewers have mentioned: the power connectors are placed in odd/bad locations. Navigating the power cable may be troublesome but be sure that it extends long enough to reach it. Otherwise, you may find yourself shortchanged. Everything else looks normal, as to be expected when you go through so many motherboards over the past several years.
Skipping straight to the overclocking findings, I've previously used a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum to achieve a 2.4GHz clockspeed with the Athlon64 X2 3800+ processor. This may not seem much to you but it is a modest and simple overclock to gain additional performance out of one's processor. The processor's normal voltage is 1.40 as specified by their OPN documentation and markings. At stock speed, the processor runs as normal but I did not take into account of Prime'ing and Memtest86 to test its stability. Given that I have done this before on the previous motherboard at stock speed, I felt that it was not needed anyway.
I jumped straight to 2.4GHz by bumping the FSB to 240MHz, setting the HT multi to 4, and leaving the CPU voltage at default. It boots to Windows but failed Prime. Memtest86 showed no errors after 2 test runs. Looking at the BIOS, the CPU voltage can be incremented or decremented (up to -0.1v) in 0.025 steps. The first step showed slight improvement, but still failed when Prime'ing. At +0.05v, stability begins to show but unfortunately failed after some load was placed in addition to Prime'ing. Strangely, this failure was after a full session/run of playing Battlefield 2. However, the crash I had earlier when playing seem to be one of the signs that it wasn't truly stable, something that I didn't take into account before. Although that's just speculating.
As of now, the processor is now running with a +0.075v adjustment from stock voltage and 12 straight hours of Prime'ing returned no errors. This also includes using uTorrent for seeding, an X-chat session with 8 IRC networks connected, gaim, and Media Player Classic running an AVI on infinite loop during the 12 hour test period. While more can be done to place additional load, I do not see what else that can be done to possibly force any instability.
As additional information, memory clock was forced at DDR400 with no modifications to DRAM timings that the BIOS provide. No additional tweaks were made since then as the goal was to retain a 2.4GHz overclock with as little tweaking as possible. Temperatures were not taken yet as the system is slowly getting softwares reinstalled. I'll update as necessary to provide these information.