nForce-based motherboards have traditionally been pretty good at overclocking, but seeing as how we're still dealing with a beta motherboard we didn't really know what to expect. The first thing we did was lower the CPU multiplier to 6x so the processor would not limit our motherboard overclocking.

Going up a few MHz at a time, the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI easily passed 210 MHz but we ran into problems soon afterwards. No matter what we did we could not go 1 MHz above the 214 MHz mark. If we tried, the system would randomly lock up while booting Windows or just lock up at the POST screen.

Raising the voltages (CPU, memory, HTT, core) didn't help get us one MHz higher, which was odd. We're just hoping that these low overclocking results are due to a beta motherboard rather than bad silicon.

The GA-K8NXP-SLI BIOS

To access the Advanced Chipset Features, we must first press CTRL + F1 at the main menu. Once inside we can adjust HyperTransport speed, the width of the up and downstream links and enable/disable SSE/SSE2. As you can see the memory tweaks are here too and boy do you get a lot of options!

The motherboard frequency can be adjusted from 200-400 MHz in 1 MHz increments while the PCI Express clock goes from 100-150 MHz again in 1 MHz increments. I'm not sure what the Linear RGB clock does so I left this at default. You can raise the CPU voltage a maximum of 0.25V, HTT 0.3V and memory 0.2V. I'm not sure what the Core Power voltage control refers to (perhaps NF4-SLI voltage?) but that can go up 0.3V too.

PCStats Test System Specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon64 4000+ Clock Speed: 12 x 200 MHz = 2.4 GHz Motherboards: ASRock K8 Combo-Z/ASR (ALi M1689)* Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 (K8T800 Pro)* MSI K8T Neo2 FIR (K8T800 Pro)* MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NF3 Ultra)* Epox 9NDA3+ (NF3 Ultra)* Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 (NF4 Ultra)** Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (NF4 SLI)*** Videocard: Asus X800XT/VTD* MSI RX800XT-VTD256** MSI NX6600GT-TD128E*** Memory: 2x 512MB Mushkin PC3200 Special Ed. Hard Drive: 40GB Western Digital Special Ed CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: Seasonic Super Tornado 400W Software Setup WindowsXP Build 2600 VIA 4in1 4.55V Forceware 6.10 Beta Catalyst 4.12 Workstation Benchmarks SYSMark 2004 Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 Super Pi SiSoft Sandra 2004 PCMark04 3DMark2001SE 3DMark05 AquaMark3 Comanche 4 X2: The Threat UT2003 UT2004 Doom 3

*Using the Asus X800XT/TVD which is based on the Radeon X800XT PE GPU. **Using the PCI Express-based MSI RX800XT-VTD256 which uses the Radeon X800XT GPU (slightly slower than the Asus card). *** Gigabyte motherboard was tested with both the RX800XT-VTD256 and two MSI GeForce 6600GT (NX6600GT-TD128E) in SLI mode.