Biostar T-Force P965
11. Overclocking
The Biostar T-Force P965 isn't advertised as an overclocking champion. We were very curious to see how this board would perform with our test setup. There are some problems with overclocking, at least when compared with other, better known overclocking boards:
- The P965 doesn't support setting the internal CPU multiplier from the BIOS. This means limited overclocking capabilities, especially with CPUs like E6600 and higher. That shouldn't be a big problem for the E6300 CPUs however.
- The P965 doesn't offer many fsb:ram ratios, beside the "usual" 1:1, 4:5 & 2:3. Asus boards offer up to 1:2, unleashing the full DRAM speed, especially with the proper "fast" memory
- We noticed problems when setting the "standard" timings we used (4-4-4-8) at 800MHz in all tests. The board would 't POST and instead, chose 5-4-4-12 which dropped memory performance, as was indicated in all of our tests. This happened with the Crucial PC2-8000 memory kit, so it's possible that with other memory modules, this problem doesn't exist.
After the above important notices, let's proceed to the actual tests. Without modifying the voltages, we pumped up the FSB to 340MHz and our E6600 reached 3.060GHz. While we could go higher, the system was not stable. In comparison, the P5B Deluxe with the exactly same setup can go up to 350MHz FSB:
Due to the fact that we cannot lower the internal CPU Multiplier, we couldn't find out how much higher this board could go. We looked all over the net at other reviews, which indicated that the T-Force P965 Deluxe (a more complete version), can reach ~500MHz FSB with E6300 CPU and with the proper memory modules. That's very good performance from a board that only costs €100!