For some reason (I guess good engineering?), Epox motherboards tend to hit overclocking highs that are almost impossible for most other manufacturers.... but this isn't always a given.

Before we started overclocking, we first lowered the CPU multiplier to 8x and the memory divider to 166 MHz mode. This way neither the processor nor the memory would be limiting the EP-9NPA+ Ultra motherboard in terms of overclocking.

Starting at 200 MHz we slowly increased the motherboard clock speed upwards. Things were uneventful from the start, and it easily passed 260Mhz before running into a few problems at 263 MHz. Increasing the nF4 Ultra chipset voltage to 1.8V solved this, and the EP-9NPA+ Ultra was then able to continue on.

Amazingly the motherboard hit a very sweet 307 MHz before it started to become unstable! We think heat may be the issue as the medium sized heatsink on the NF4-SLI chipset was too hot to touch. Luckily, since the holes around the chipset are compatible with older videocard heatsinks, finding something that fits shouldn't be too hard.

Up next, we take peek inside the many tweaking options of the EP-9NPA+ Ultra's BIOS...