EPoX 9NDA3+ nForce3 Ultra Socket 939 Motherboard

Overclocking:

Overclocking on the 9NDA3+ was fairly straight forward using the various BIOS options mentioned on the previous page. We dropped the CPU multiplier down to 8x to aid in achieving a higher front side bus. The HyperTransport multiplier automatically drops down to 4x when a FSB higher than 220MHz is selected, and we had to manually drop the multiplier down to 3x around 285MHz because of stability issues.

All in all, we were able to hit 310MHz FSB, however I'm pretty sure the CPU was holding us back from reaching any higher speeds. In reality there really isn't a need to run such a high FSB, but its good to know the capability is there.

I've been running this system overclocked most of the time at 9 x 275FSB (2.47GHz) with the HyperTransport multiplier set at 4x (1.1GHz) and it has been running like a champ. Overclocking has so many dynamics it's not really worth trying to post any benchmarks. Needless to say, it is possible to achieve some respectable overclocking with this board. One minor complaint I have is the DDR undervolting, and the CPU voltage is somewhat limited.

Test Setups & Benchmarks Used:

Onboard sound was used (required for Sysmark 2004), however SATA was disabled (because we did not use it). To keep consistency in the benchmarks, all of the tests were run in the same exact order and the system rebooted between benchmarks.