Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 260 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

nVIDIA and its nForce chipsets are known to be excellent overclockers so I thought it would be interesting to see how high the ECS KN1-SLI Extreme could go. ECS does not have much of a history in terms of overclocking but we will not let that hold us back. ;-) Before I began the overclocking adventure, I first lowered the CPU multiplier to 6x and memory frequency to 166 MHz. I do leave HTT at stock, I am interested in seeing how high the motherboard will go before I lower the HTT multiplier.

Starting at 200 MHz, I began to slowly raise the motherboard clock speed in ~5 MHz intervals. Less experienced overclockers should probably go a bit slower. The ECS KN1-SLI Extreme was actually a pretty overclocker friendly motherboard to use and I did not experience any problems until the 230 MHz mark. At this speed, the KN1-SLI Extreme had problems POSTing or loading windows, the system would simply crash. Lowering the HTT multiplier to 4x solved this issue and I continued to push the motherboard faster.

The ECS KN1-SLI Extreme motherboard actually overclocked very well, and I hit a top speed of 260 MHz before things started to fall apart. Anything above 260 MHz and I could not guarantee stability, lowering the HTT multiplier did not help here. I have a feeling that chipset voltage was the issue and if ECS allows for that option in the future, who knows!?

The KN1-SLI Extreme BIOS:

In the Advanced Chipset Features section in the ECS motherboard we are first greeted by the overclocking options. The motherboard clock speed can be adjusted from 200-400 MHz in 1 MHz increments. HTT Frequency can be tuned between 100-2000 MHz with the HT multiplier, and users can also adjust the up and down 'data width size.' CPU voltage can be increased an additional 0.375V, and memory voltage can be raised to 3.11V which is rather impressive for an ECS motherboard.

In the DRAM configuration menu we have the... memory timing adjustments. ;-) Here you can adjust the memory speed as well as the memory timings shown. Not quite as many tweaks as we have seen with other motherboards, but you get the basics.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: albatron k8x890 pro ii (k8t890) msi rs480m2-il (rs480) chaintech zenith vnf4 ultra (nf4 ultra) dfi lanparty nf4 sli-dr (nf4 sli) epox 9npa+ sli (nf4 sli) ecs kn1-sli extreme (nf4 sli) videocard: msi nx7800gtx-vt2d256e memory: 2x 512mb pdp pdc1g3200+xblk hard drive: 74gb western digital raptor sata cdrom: aopen combo 52x heatsink: amd athlon64 4000+ reference heatsink powersupply: pc power & cooling turbocool 510 sli software setup windowsxp forceware 6.53 forceware 77.77 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