Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 312 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

nVIDIA's nForce and GeForce chipsets have always been good at overclocking and we were hoping for good results from the ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready motherboard. Equipped with an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processor and a set of Corsair DOMINATOR Twin2X2048-8888C4DF memory the CPU clock multiplier was first set to 8x and the memory to run at DDR2-533 MHz mode.

Starting at 200 MHz the motherboard clock speed was increased in 5 MHz increments. Speeds of 220, 240 and 280 MHz came and went easily. Without chipset voltage adjustments in the BIOS the motherboard soon reached its maximum speed of 312 MHz.

All things considered, the ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready overclocked pretty well for an integrated MicroATX motherboard. It's not the fastest motherboard we've tested but then again it's not designed to be. ;-)

The ASRock BIOS:

ASRock places the overclocking and memory timing options in the same area. The motherboard frequency can be adjusted from 150-400 MHz in 1 MHz increments and you have full CPU clock multiplier adjustments. Maximum CPU voltage is 1.4V and there are no memory or chipset voltage options so don't expect too much in the way of overclocking from this board. There are the usual memory timing options available in this menu as well.

Prelude to Benchmarks

As the nVIDIA GeForce 7050PV chipset is Microsoft Windows Vista ready, PCSTATS will be testing the ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready motherboard in Windows Vista 32 bit. Consequently there are slightly less benchmarks than we would normally have for a WindowsXP based test system because benchmark compatibility with Vista is still finding its feet. To reiterate, the benchmark results on the following pages were all conducted within Microsoft Vista Ultimate.

The details of how the ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this nVIDIA GeForce 7050PV based motherboard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system #1 reference system #2 reference system #3 processor: amd Athlon64 X2 5000+ (AM2) AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ (AM2) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 AMD Athlon64 FX-60 (Socket 939) Clock Speed: 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz 9 x 266 MHz = 2.4 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz Motherboard: ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready (GF 7050PV) Biostar TF7050-M2 (GF 7050PV) MSI K9AGM2-FIH (AMD 690G) Albatron KM51PV-AM2 (GF6150) ECS AMD690GM-M2 (AMD 690G) ECS G33T-M2 (Intel G33 Expresss) Asus A8N-VM (GF 6150) Videocard: MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD-OC Memory: 2x 1024MB Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 2x 1024MB Corsair Twin2X2048-8888C4DF 2x 1024MB Patriot PDC2G4000ELK Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Intel Reference AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Software Setup: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate nVIDIA Forceware 15.00 ATi Catalyst 7.4 nVIDIA Forceware 158.18 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2007 Preview SiSoft Sandra XIb PCMark05 3DMark06 Doom 3 FEAR