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BIOS
Advanced
Chipset Features |
Since
Epox's last two bios updates, they've added more
tweaks to the BIOS. They basically allow you to
set memory timings to 5-2-2-2. Before the update,
you can only set it to 6-2-3-3. I remember having
to resort to WPCREDIT just to tweak the board.
The
frequency/voltage control has a couple of differences
with that of the 8KTA3 bios. One is that they now
let you toggle enabled/disabled for spread spectrum
(no matter the FSB) and also, they let you choose
cpu clock by 1mhz increment.
Overclocking
Well
since I have all the voltage settings that I could
ask for, I decided to overclock my 1200 mhz AVIA.
The highest I could get was 1400 mhz at 1.91 volts.
1450 booted into Windows at 2.0 volts but I couldn't
run it stable enough to get benchmarks. 1500 booted
into Windows as well but immediately gave me the
friendly registry error a second into the desktop.
To my dismay, the board would not run at 150 mhz.
Now, I know this one board does not represent the
whole batch but I was really disappointed with the
fact that the board only ran up stably up to 145
mhz FSB. I knew that something must be wrong with
the north bridge or something so I investigated
a bit more.
After
a benchmark run at 1400 mhz, I turned off the computer
and touched the northbridge's heatsink and found
that it was not warm at all. So, I then removed
the heatsink and found this:
I'm no expert in applying thermal compound but
this is just too much! There is actually so much
thermal paste that there is not much metal to metal
contact between the heatsink and the northbridge.
So, of course I cleaned out the northbridge and
heatsink.
So
there the northbridge was clean again. I proceeded
with applying just enough thermal compound (just
as thin as I would on a PPGA processor).
It
might seem that I did place too much thermal compound
but at least it isn't as much as what Epox put on.
I decided to test how much contact the heatsink
would have with the northbridge so I placed the
heatsink on top of it and pressed down.
So
I let it stick for a few seconds and then pulled
the heatsink and what did I find?
My
first reaction was actually, what the f---? I even
pressed down the heatsink again and even tried attaching
it but as you see in the picture above, that's just
how much contact the heatsink had with the northbridge.
No wonder I couldn't get it to run at 150mhz! But
anyway, at this configuration, I couldn't even run
the system at 100mhz FSB which means to say that
the northbridge must be overheating.
Afterwards, I had a friend file down the bottom
of the heatsink so that the surface would be more
flat. Afterwards, I tried gunning for 150 mhz FSB
again but still could not get it to work. Now I'm
guessing that it might be a limitation on the northbridge
itself but I'm betting my balls that it just lacks
cooling since even when we filed it down a bit,
the contact just wasn't that good still. And because
the board had to be returned, we didn't want to
lap the heatsink too much.
So I settled for 1.4ghz from 1.2ghz at 1.9 volts.
It was a pretty good overclock for an AVIA processor
running on aircooling. Benchmarks |
