Athlon64 Motherboards: First Look at Chaintech, FIC, and MSI

Chaintech ZNF3-150: BIOS and Overclocking

Chaintech uses the familiar Phoenix-Award BIOS. As detailed in Basic Features, a full range of overclocking options are available including adjustable CPU voltage, memory voltage, AGP voltage , and Chipset voltage. As we have seen on all nVidia chipsets, AGP/PCI clock can be fixed for maximum overclocking. The latest 9/19/03 BIOS adds a full range of manual memory timing selections to the Advanced chipset section.

The Athlon64 has a full heatspreader like Pentium4, so it would appear that any multiplier adjustments would have to be available on the board or in the BIOS. There are no selections for multiplier adjustments in the BIOS. We also did not find Multiplier Adjustments on any of the other Athlon64 boards that we examined.

FSB Overclocking Results

One of the questions about Athlon64 that everyone has asked is whether it will support overclocking that will be competitive to the ranges offered by Intel 800FSB processors. Our 3200+ chip, with a default FSB setting of 200, was able to boot into Windows as high as 236FSB. We found that we could achieve stable operation at 230FSB by lowering the memory setting to 333, so we were running near DDR400 at a 230 setting. The highest stable 1:1 overclock (DDR400 memory setting) that we could achieve was at 222FSB.

Front Side Bus Overclocking Testbed
Processor:	AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2.0GHz)
CPU Voltage:	1.525V (default)
Cooling:	Cooler Master Athlon64 HSF
Memory:	2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3200L2 at 2-2-2-6 timings
Power Supply:	Powmax 350W

We are looking at our first samples of Athlon64 boards, but for those who wish to overclock their systems, you will be pleased to find that there is some decent headroom for overclocking. However, without multiplier adjustments in BIOS or any visible means to change multipliers on the heatshield covered chip, it is critical that the BIOS offer fixed ratios for AGP/PCI for best overclocking results. The Chaintech ZNF3-150 has the ability to fix the AGP/PCI frequency.