ECS KA3MVP Extreme Motherboard – ECS Tries Enthusiast

The Tests: Overclocking

OK, so far we have seen that this ECS board lives up to its name of “Extreme” in the area of features and bundle. It does not do so well in the area of bios settings for “Extreme” use of the board in memory timings and in vcore voltage. Because of the lack of control over the Cas and Command rate, this board did not score “Extreme” as compared to the MSI K9A Platinum. The last are to look at that has us wondering about the “Extreme” name is the are of overclocking. I can tell you right now, with the lack of vcore settings in the bios, I was not looking for anything great from this board. And I was right. Our overclocking was frustrating from the beginning, as the board just did not seem to respond well to large changes in HTT settings. We had to raise the HTT by no more than 10 at a time to do our overclocking. I could not just set it to 260 and go with it. I had to start at 200 and work my way up. And once you hit the wall, the only way I could get the board back MOST of the time was to clear the cmos. Once and a while the board would come back with a power down and then a power up, but not often.

We started by using the stock multiplier on the 5000+ that we have, which is 13. With it set at that we were able to get the board to 219. And that was with the vcore maxed!

We then switched to a multiplier of 11. With that, and still with the vcore maxed, we were able to reach an HTT of 252.

Lastly, we went with a multiplier of 10, and we were then able to get up to an HTT setting of 270.

Clearly, this board was no where near the “Extreme” when it came to overclocking, as we have been able to get this CPU over 3.1ghz on other boards. Maybe a new bios can help with this as well. Time will tell!