mATX s478 board with minor overclocking, funny comments

[Zap]

... chasing after a pipe dream? Just 'cause, looked on the 'Egg for any mATX boards with dual channel memory and potential overclocking features. My only hope would be for an i865G chipset mATX board with some minor FSB clocking (vcore using wire trick). What I found was the FOXCONN "865M01-G-6ELS" i865G Chipset Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU. It basically lets you go 32MHz up on FSB. Not saying much, but more than most mATX P4 boards, plus only $75 with an Intel chipset and dual channel support. Decided to look through ocmments and found a review that made me laugh. Here are some excerpts and my comments...

I've been building systems for over 15 years

Ahah, soon as I saw that I knew we had a winner.

Wouldn't recognize my 2.4 ghz prescott as hyperthreading enabled.

There currently does not exist a 2.4GHz Prescott chip with HyperThreading. Only 2.4GHz chip with HT is the Northwood 2.4C. Only Prescott 2.4GHz chips are the P4 2.4A and the Deleron 320, both w/o HT.

Anyways, the rest of that review was nice and useful, just that I thought it funny in places.

Anyone around here use this board? I still have a mATX aluminum case that I've been hanging onto for a year, wanting to build a gaming system into.

 

[smoothness]

i've been looking at that thing for a while - i'm always on the edge, wondering if i should buy it or not. i might take the plunge and put a 2.0 533 in it. it looks good enough on paper, and foxconn is a reputable builder. i'd sway a little bit more towards buying it, but it's your choice. i felt bad for your post too, so i decided to share =p. there's also a gigabyte one on newegg with similar properties - check that one out for comparison?

 

[kef7]

I finally bit the bullet and bought the same foxconn board last week (and the price was $11 cheaper) and partially assembled it over the weekend.

It has a 2.8C mo stepping running at 232fsb with ram at 5:4 (only have valueram).

There are no voltage options in BIOS; there was a review of this mobo (maybe at bigbruin.com?) that mentioned foxconn was working on adding more tweaking options but don't think they ever got around to it.

Max fsb setting in BIOS is 233 but I had one reboot while running prime95 at 233 so I dropped it to 232.

I need to do further stability testing but will probably wait until I get a better sfx psu. (current psu is a 145w PC power&cooling which is doing fine but I'm using only onboard devices and have not added a soundcard or vidcard yet)

Included in the software package is a utility to overclock within windows but I haven't tried it yet.

All in all I'm very happy with it so far.

 

[kef7]

for anyone interested here are two reviews of the slightly different G-6LS model (no firewire)

bigbruin review

ocia review