This is not a motherboard made for overclocking, but I can not let a review go on without testing to see how far you can push it. The first great news here is that the BIOS is filled with all types of tweaking and voltage control options. Rarely do you see a mATX motherboard with full voltage and speed controls. This promises nothing as far as over-clocking, but it is the first requirement for a decent over-clocking board.

I was able to get a decent overclock with this board. The CPU is not an amazing over-clocker, but there is surely some head room left in it. Overall, for being a motherboard that clearly was not designed for over-clocking, it does a great job.

Testing

It is time to begin testing to see how well this motherboard performs. Until this point, the motherboard has surpassed all my expectations. Initially, booting up the computer was not a problem. The memory is default voltage is 1.95, which is more than sufficient to boot this RAM. I have had problems with many other boards in the past. It is nice to see a board that simply works.

There are not a lot of various benchmarks for motherboards, but I will use a few programs that stress different parts of the computer. Since this motherboard also supports onboard video, I will run some games through the benchmarks too.

I occasionally run into problems with the heat-sinks on chipsets becoming really hot. It does not seem good to run that hot. My reaction to this is to set up a fan over the chipset. With a heat-sink this small, I was all but ready to get a fan out of the closet. However, it was not hot at all. Two thumbs up to AMD for this incredible chipset.

WinRar

This benchmark uses a few important parts of the motherboard: the CPU, the memory, the chipset, and the Southbridge. This test will see how fast the computer can zipped and extract data. Higher speeds are better.

PCMark Vantage

This tests the whole thing about the computer from gaming to word processing. It will provide us a great look at everything about the board, like the audio, network IC, the chipset, and even the hard drives and memory. The CPU will be used in all the tests.