The FSB and core voltage tweaking is available in the Hardware Monitor setup
section within the BIOS. There are five tweakable items, "Spread Spectrum,"
which should be disabled when overclocking, as well as "Stop Un-used PCI Clock,"
which should be left enabled.
Next you can adjust "CPU Frequency Selection," which can be set from 90Mhz,
95Mhz, 100-125Mhz, 133Mhz, 140Mhz, and finally 150Mhz. In a day and age where a
200mhz FSB selection is available (on Abit SoftMenu III motherboards,) 150Mhz
might seem like it's too conservative. However past experiences tells me that
anything above 115Mhz FSB (230Mhz) is highly unlikely anyway. There seems to be
a huge instability problem with all AMD Athlon motherboards with FSB's above
115Mhz.
The next item is "CPU Voltage Selection," which you can adjust from 1.4, 1.45, 1.55, 1.6, 1.65, 1.7, 1.75 volts. The
upper limit of 1.75V seems to be too conservative. Perhaps 1.8 and 1.85V would be a
better upper limit. Most GFD devices go at least that far.
The last item is "Chassis Intrusion" which keeps track of the number of times
your case is opened, I highly recommend leaving this "feature" disabled. Below
all of that, you can see your CPU and Case temperature readouts, as well as the
speed readouts for the CPU, power fan, and system fan. Voltage readouts follow;
Vcore voltage, Vsram, 3.3V, etc.
An AMD Athlon 550A (.18 micron) was used to test the overclocking prowess of
the K7 Pro. Overclocking with this motherboard is quite simple; I pressed delete
on boot up to enter the version 1.3 BIOS and under the Hardware Monitor Setup
section, I adjusted the core voltage to 1.65V and raised the Frontside Bus
frequency to 110Mhz (effectively 220Mhz, as the bus is a DDR bus.) This result
is very important to note, in regards to overclocked stability, as our Asus K7V
can not overclock this same CPU to the same level using FSB increases. The Asus
K7V was only able to overclock to 107Mhz (214Mhz fsb.) Having the CPU
overclocking feature placed within the same menu as the Hardware monitoring
features is a good idea because you can see the CPU and system temperature
readouts as you overclock. It makes more sense than to keep these functions
separate.
Unfortunately, 110Mhz was the highest FSB frequency that
I was able to attain, however, the K7 Pro was still able to beat the K7V in
regards to overclocked stability. With just this info I can assume that the MSI
would still be a better choice for stability, simply because with only FSB
increases, the MSI K7 Pro was able to outshine the Asus K7V