Overclocking:

As mentioned earlier in the review, the BIOS is well stocked with options for overclocking. Minimal effort (just a bit more CPU voltage) was required to take advantage of these features, and the system was able to soar beyond the stock settings. The images below are taken from CPU-Z with the 3GHz E6850 CPU run up to 3.465GHZ thanks to bumping the bus speed from 333MHz to 385MHz. The corresponding memory speed was 1232MHz, with timings of 5-5-5-15. While the CPU could go all the way up to 400MHz bus speed, the FSB:DRAM ratios available were either too high for the memory to boot, or too low and the performance took a hit.


The chart below details a few stock versus overclocked benchmark results.


The overclock described above results in a CPU and memory speed boost of 15.5%, and running through a few benchmarks shows that it is a worthwhile move. The Performance Test v6.1 CPU Mark score improved from 1728.4 to 2027.5 (17.3%), the system's PassMark rating improved from 845.3 to 964.4 (14.1%), and the Everest ultimate Edition memory read speed improved from 8026 to 9529 (18.7%).

As a second test of how easily the system overclocks, a 2GHz E2180 dual core processor (800MHz FSB) quickly reached 3.0GHz (1200MHz FSB) with just a bit more voltage.