We haven't overclocked a SIS chipset board in a while, so we were interested to see what we could squeeze out of this budget motherboard. Once we'd checked the BIOS options though, it became obvious that the MSI 661FM3-V was not designed with overclocking in mind. No incremental FSB increases are available; instead we had two options: 206MHz or 210MHz. Also there was no way to adjust the core voltage.

Giving it the old school try, we raised the FSB to 206MHz, but the board would not boot into Windows. Raising memory voltage did not help, and the lack of other options meant that our hands were tied. Suffice to say that the 661FM3-V is not intended for overclocking.

The MSI/SIS BIOS

The DRAM configuration menu is found within the Advanced BIOS Configuration section, and gives us all the basic memory settings, but little else.

To put it mildly, overclocking options are not the 661FM3-V's strong suit. What choices there are can be found within the Frequency/Voltage control menu. FSB can only be changed from 200MHz to 206MHz and 210MHz, while 133MHz (for Celeron processors) can be upped to 137MHz and 140MHz. No incremental overclocking is available. Memory voltage goes up to 2.8V and AGP to 1.8V while no core voltage adjustment is available.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: intel pentium 4 3.2e amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: albatron px925xe pro-r (925xe)* gigabyte ga-8anxp-d (925x)* msi 915p neo2 platinum (915p)* dfi lanparty 875p-t (i875p)** asrock 775v88 (pt880)** gigabyte ga-8n-sli royal (nf4-sli intel)* ecs rs400-a (rs400)* msi 661fm3-v (661fx)** videocard: asus x800xt/vtd** msi rx800xt-vtd256* memory: 2x 512mb mushkin pc3200 special ed. 2x 512mb pdp patriot 3200+xbl hard drive: 40gb western digital special ed 74gb western digital raptor sata cdrom: aopen combo 52x powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w software setup windowsxp build 2600 via 4in1 4.55v forceware 6.10 catalyst 5.4 workstation benchmarks sysmark 2004 business winstone 2004 content creation 2004 super pi sisoft sandra 2004 pcmark04 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 aquamark3 comanche 4 x2: the threat ut2003 ut2004 doom 3

* - msi rx800xt videocard used ** - asus x800xt pe videocard used