I've got my E4300 up to 2.7ghz at stock voltage with the PT880dual-vsta, raising the FSB from 200 to 300mhz. The board offers decent overclocking options, with asynch PCIe, PCI, AGP, and RAM options. You can set the DDR to several different clock dividers to help with overclocking - luckily I had Patriot PC4000 (DDR-500, 250/500mhz) from a couple years back so thats not a constraint, but this board should be able to reach full overclock with any DDR given the proper settings.
300mhz on the FSB seems to be about the limit for the PT880. I have a massive aftermarket CPU fan and heat is definitely not the issue (runs at about 30C at 60% load with the fan on minimum speed). More voltage might help but from other reports I have read, this board/chipset hit a wall at 300mhz on the FSB - which makes the E4300 a great option for it with the 9x multiplier.
There is voltage adjust in the bios for the RAM, but not CPU or chipset, however there are a couple hacks for that which I haven't tried yet:
You can hack the motherboard voltages with a pencil: http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=93127
You can also hack the CPU voltage with conductive pen and tape: http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=3904
I would like to get the 3.5ghz overclock people talk about but this motherboard is probably not going to reach that even with voltage hacks.
At 2.7ghz my performance in games dramatically improved, dual core is great! This is so much faster than my 2.6ghz celeron was. Games definitely benefit from dual core even if they are multithreated. The kernel, directX and the driver can run on one cpu with the game on another. Stuttering be gone!
Also, for those having trouble upgrading XP from uniprocessor to multiprocessor (which it normally will not recognize - you may not even notice it or realize but it won't necessarily recognize your dual core CPU!), check out this page which offers some tips: http://www.handaware.com/multiprocessor_XP.html - hope that saves someone the trouble I went through.
300mhz on the FSB seems to be about the limit for the PT880. I have a massive aftermarket CPU fan and heat is definitely not the issue (runs at about 30C at 60% load with the fan on minimum speed). More voltage might help but from other reports I have read, this board/chipset hit a wall at 300mhz on the FSB - which makes the E4300 a great option for it with the 9x multiplier.
There is voltage adjust in the bios for the RAM, but not CPU or chipset, however there are a couple hacks for that which I haven't tried yet:
You can hack the motherboard voltages with a pencil: http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=93127
You can also hack the CPU voltage with conductive pen and tape: http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=3904
I would like to get the 3.5ghz overclock people talk about but this motherboard is probably not going to reach that even with voltage hacks.
At 2.7ghz my performance in games dramatically improved, dual core is great! This is so much faster than my 2.6ghz celeron was. Games definitely benefit from dual core even if they are multithreated. The kernel, directX and the driver can run on one cpu with the game on another. Stuttering be gone!
Also, for those having trouble upgrading XP from uniprocessor to multiprocessor (which it normally will not recognize - you may not even notice it or realize but it won't necessarily recognize your dual core CPU!), check out this page which offers some tips: http://www.handaware.com/multiprocessor_XP.html - hope that saves someone the trouble I went through.
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