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| Overclocking Results: |
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The Intel
Core 2 Duo 'Conroe' E6600 processor runs on a 1066 MHz FSB (266 MHz motherboard
clock speed) which means it's already faster than what any Intel Pentium D 840
will overclock too from a 800MHz (200MHz) starting point. As usual before the
overclocking began, PCSTATS set the Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 memory frequency to run in
DDR2-533 mode, this way the memory will not hold the Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H
motherboard back from hitting it's highest possible speeds.
The P9657AA-8KS2H
also supports lowering the CPU multiplier to 6x, so we set the Core 2 Duo E6600
processors to that so we'd have one less bottleneck.
Starting at
266 MHz FSB the Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H's clock speed was increased in small 2-3
MHz intervals. Overclocking with the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is still
somewhat of an unknown experience for me so I wanted to take things nice and
slow.
Yet from
the start Foxconn's P9657AA-8KS2H motherboard showed it was definitely up to the
overclocking challenge, and it handled each increase in clock speed very well.
In fact the P9657AA-8KS2H did not give us any problems until 325 MHz. Getting
past that speed required the Intel P965 Express chipset voltage to be increased
slightly (0.24V).
The road
was smooth sailing from 325MHz right on through to the board's maximum
overclocked speed of 352 MHz! Anything further caused instability in our trials,
and thus could not be guaranteed. An overclocked speed of 352 MHz is definitely
very quick, and this makes the Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H one of the fastest P965 Express
motherboards PCSTATS has tested to date!. It's nice to see that the P965 Express
chipset overclocks this well with the Core 2 Duo processor. Me thinks this might
just be the sleeper upgrade hit of the year...
BIOS Options and Tweaks:
Looking
around inside the Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H BIOS we soon discovered that Foxconn has
really increased the amount of overclocking options available to the user.
Yippe!!
The
P9657AA-8KS2H BIOS includes basic memory timing adjustments, and in particular
note that memory clock frequency goes as high as 800 MHz. It was set to 533 MHz
for our overclocking purposes.
The FSB can be adjusted from 200-600 MHz FSB in 1 MHz
increments, CPU voltage goes as high as 0.3V above stock, DDR2 voltage goes as
high as 0.6V above stock and the MCH voltage to 0.24V above stock.
Up next, benchmarks of this 'Conroe' based Core 2 Duo
system!
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