Since my Soltek 86SPE-L could not POST at any Front Side Bus (FSB) speed higher than 270 MHz using any divider, I was ready to ove-rclock this motherboard. Knowing my processor will probably do a bit more than 3.2 GHz on air cooling, I was hoping I could go higher. The BIOS lets you type in a FSB value between 200 and 350 MHz, so there is lots of headroom.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems getting higher than 240 FSB. It seems that the Aggressive Memory Mode, designed to make interactions between the chipset and the memory even faster than normal, was getting in the way so I had to relax it from its Max setting to Standard. I also had to add more voltage to the RAM, pushing my Infineon to 2.9 V. Finally, I had to relax the divider from an automatic setting (at 240 MHz, the BIOS would have used a 5:4 divider) to 3:2, or 6:4 as is written in the BIOS. I also could not get the CMOS over-clocking failure restore feature to work consistently. According to EPoX, if the motherboard detects an over-clocking failure beyond a certain point in the POST process, I could press Insert to reset the CMOS to more relaxed settings .I could not get this feature to work constantly, but it is possible I was capable to POST past the motherboard's capacity to detect a failure.

Having said that the motherboard came with a default Vdimm of 2.8V. I am not confident why EPoX started with this, but I suspect that the board under volts its components slightly. I currently have the BIOS set to give the CPU 1.625 V, but CPU-Z and the Universal System Diagnostic Manager (USDM) from EPoX both say that the Vcore is 1.616 V.

Measuring temperatures can be interesting too if you did not know what the USDM is, since Motherboard Monitor does not know about this board and setting it to read the 4PDA5+ like a 4PDA2+ told me that the CPU temperature was 88C and the system temp was 51-degrees C when the BIOS consistently read 39 C for the CPU and 31-degrees C for the system.

Incrementing in 5 MHz steps, I was capable to take the system to 285 MHz using a 3:2 divider and 2.5-4-4-8 memory timings. I was able to start the computer at this speed, but Windows refused to start at 290 FSB. The computer was highly unstable at 285 and 280, so I ended up with Windows not starting I was wondering what more I could do, but I think I will need to obtain better memory, heat spreaders for my Infineon RAM, or probably a water cooling system to go higher.

In short, I think there is more to be had from this board, and I could not max it out once I figured out what I required to do to get past the 240 MHz barrier.