AOpen AK73 ProA KT133A ATX

Overclocking

Just like the previous KT133A motherboards, we performed the overclocking tests in order to find out the highest FSB speeds the system can sustain.  FSB overclocking with the KT133 chipset is not interesting because we have shown that the chipset, in general, can’t get any higher than 110MHz.  The KT133A chipset is different since it is capable of achieving higher FSB speeds, potentially narrowing the gap between the speed of the motherboard and that of the CPU. 

For the testing we used a stick of 128MB Mushkin High Performance Rev. 3 SDRAM and an NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS as our test bed.  We started the testing by setting the CPU to run at 133MHz FSB.  Then we gradually increased the FSB and ran tests to make sure the system was stable at that speed.  If needed, we also tried to set the CAS latency to 3 and all other memory timings to as slow as possible, so that the PC133 SDRAM would not be the limiting factor.  Moreover, when the CPU speed got to high, we lowered the multiplier ratio so that the CPU would be running as close as possible to its original clock speed.

Unfortunately, the overclocking results were not impressive for the AK73 ProA.  No matter how we set the memory settings, the system couldn’t do anything higher than 140MHz. 

On the other hand, this result is quite disappointing as well.  Our memory is rated at 150MHz at 2-2-2 settings, so the memory was not the bottleneck.  And from our previous reviews, all other motherboards were able to sustain FSB speeds of 150MHz and higher.  Compared with the AK73 ProA, the mere 5% overclock is even less than what the KT133 chipset could offer.

Several reasons might have contributed to this.  For starters, it could be a simple BIOS fault, and AOpen should be able to fix that easily with an update.  Secondly, the layout could be a problem, since the design of the board is very similar to that of AK73 Pro, which might not be able to sustain the higher clock frequencies. If we had to guess, it’s more likely to be a layout issue, but we’ll keep an eye out for BIOS updates that might help with overclocking.