Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 305 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

To get the most out of this Asus M2R32-MVP motherboard, PCSTATS selected an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processor and a 1GB set of Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C3 memory. With these pieces of hardware, we know that the board won't be held back from reaching its top speed. Before the actual overclocking began, the AM2's CPU clock multiplier was first set to 8x, and the memory to run at DDR2-533 MHz mode, this way neither the processor or memory will hold the Asus M2R32-MVP motherboard back.

Starting from 200 MHz, we slowly increased the Asus M2R32-MVP motherboard clock speed in 4-6 MHz increments. The motherboard handled overclocking very well and easily hit 245 MHz before stability became an issue. Lowering the HyperTransport multiplier from 5x to 4x solved that issue.

At 266 MHz the ATi RD580 Northbridge voltage had to be increased slightly to 1.4V, we did this because the motherboard was giving us BSOD's while loading WindowsXP. The overclocking continued a wee bit further before the ASUS M2R32-MVP motherboard settled on its top speed of 305 MHz. That's definitely a quick result for a socket AM2 system, and it is quite impressive coming from a CrossFire Xpress 3200 motherboard. PCSTATS has tested one other ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 platform so far, an ECS KA3MVP Extreme motherboard, and that platform overclocked to 310MHz in our tests.

Options in the Asus BIOS:

In the Memory Configuration section of the Asus M2R32-MVP BIOS we find the usual memory timing adjustments. From CAS Latency, to RAS to CAS Delay, Row Precharge, Command Rate and memory frequency they're all here.

In the Configure System Frequency/Voltage section you can adjust the motherboard frequency from 200-400 MHz in 1 MHz increments. The PCI Express frequency can also be adjusted, but that's better left alone. There are CPU multiplier adjustments (depending on the model of your processor) as well as the ability to adjust HyperTransport and the CPU voltage (1.5625V max). Memory voltage can be increased to 2.45V, HyperTransport to 1.5V and Northbridge/PCI-E voltage to 1.5V.

As we saw with the ECS KA3 MVP Extreme motherboard, also based on the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset, the Asus M2R32-MVP motherboard allows users to increase the bandwidth to the Northbridge/Southbridge and PCI Express x16 slots by 10%. It doesn't make a difference for current generation videocards, but may increase performance with next gen cards.

Up next, a whole bunch of gaming and content creation benchmarks!