Asus motherboards have traditionally been good, but not exceptional at overclocking... With an AMD Athlon64 3200+ (socket 754) installed, we certainly had some high hopes for the K8N-E, so we first lowered the CPU clock multiplier to 6x. This would prevent the CPU from being the limiting factor, and would allow us to raise the clock speed of the K8NE motherboard up higher all things being equal.

So far so good, but once the Asus K8NE reached 212 MHz, the memory had a few problems and we had to raise the voltage to 2.7V to stabilize things. Continuing on, more memory problems cropped up at 230 MHz and so we had to lower the memory divider in the K8NE's BIOS from 1:1 to 6:5.

The K8N-E turned out to be a rather weird board to overclock as it would run 2D benchmarks all the way up to the 247 MHz mark, but was only stable in 3D benchmarks up to 237 MHz!? No matter what I did with voltages or memory timings, I simply could not get the Asus K8N-E we tested to function at 247 MHz for every benchmark, what a shame.

The BIOS:

In the Advanced Menu we have all the usual options we'd expect like CAS latency adjustments, RAS to CAS, 1T/2T timings, ECC, etc.

In the Frequency/Voltage settings we can turn on Asus's dynamic overclocker. The K8N-E's clock speed can be tuned from 200-300 MHz in 1 MHz increments, but you'll have to scroll to the speed you want to run at.

AGP frequency can be set from 66-75 MHz, in 1 MHz steps. There is full multiplier control (under 10x for the Athlon64 3200+), and maximum CPU voltage is 1.5V. Memory voltage goes to 2.7V and AGP 1.7V. Next up, the benchmarks.