With a quick reboot of the system we found ourselves poking around in the Bios again and checking out the Bus speed settings MSI has so kindly provided us. With the CPU Host/PCI Clock feature we can adjust the FSB speed at which the platform runs. Yep, that would be Overclocking and even if you never use this feature it's nice to know you have the option if the urge ever strikes. Looking further into this feature we see that MSI has decided to use preset bus speeds. These presets allow us to choose from a range of bus speeds starting at 100mhz. The complete list of speeds is as follows 100/33, 103/34, 105/35, 110/37, 113/38, 117/39, 133/33, 138/34, 140/35, 144/36 and finally 150/38.
Click to view largerAnother feature included in the Bios is CPU ratio. This setting will allow end users to adjust their CPU multiplier, which aids in overclocking. While reading the manual it is stated that BOTH of these provide a tool for users to overclock the processor.
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Here's a TIP for you overclockers. In order to manually set the CPU Multiplier I had to change the setting of Auto Detect DIMM/PCI Clock from Enable, which is default to DISABLED.
MSI is listening to what people are saying. Well partly at least as there are no options to adjust CPU or Dimm voltages. These features are also needed to help push a system to its edge of performance and stability. When overclocking you need to be able to feed the CPU and Dimms a bit more POWER to help push them to their limits. Without these adjustments you just can't obtain the full potential of overclocking. Now armed with information, let's see what we can get the K7D Master to do.
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First we'll see how far we can push the FSB without loosing stability. In Bios we first went to 140/35. Everything looks find booting into the OS and after running several benchmarks we decided to just go for the throat and go to 150/38. Without hesitation the K7D Master goes right into the OS and is sitting at the desktop in no time. So we start running benchmarks, blazing through the
Sandra Benchmarks the system seems to be stable. So on to the Content Creation Benchmark. About halfway through this benchmark the program returned an error and wouldn't complete. The error wasn't an OS error but an error generated by the benchmark, as it was unable to complete portions of the benchmark process. The system never locked up, just allowed me to close the benchmark and continued on to other things.
An overclocked system that is blazingly fast but can't complete its assigned tasks isn't worth having. So we will back down the FSB to 144/36 and see how it goes. Everything boots fine and after testing a couple benchmarks it's time to push the multiplier a bit. We choose 9.5 x 144Mhz that results in a processor speed of 1368Mhz.
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With a successful reboot and having again completed the Sandra Benchmarks we head into the Content Creation Benchmark and this time it runs to it's completion. With our system running stably we continue with our benchmarking and compile our results. Below are compiled overclocking results in graph form for the MSI K7D Master. This round we have left off the explanation and have provided you with a graph gallery to simplify things.
From the results you can see how the K7D Master really kicked it up a notch. The performance gained throughout the overclocked benchmark run was excellent, with the exception of our SpecView perf and DroneZ benchmarks. Again the K7D Master was quite a ways off the mark.
