Overclocking could be a nightmare to the impatient. This is not your bump your fsb and tweak your voltages thingy. Bumping the FSB is not that easy as you have to do a gradual increase in mhz. Going straight, say to 150mhz FSB, will cause the system to not even POST. But doing the FSB bumping in increments of not more than 8mhz per bump, at least in my case, should be alright. The maximum FSB overclock we can achieve with this KT333 board is 156mhz FSB. However that is only with a synchronous DRAM speed of 156mhz as the asynchronous 166mhz option will will only work up to 145FSB. I tried using their overclocking software built into the BIOS, RedStorm, but it would not work perfectly and would always hang everytime. Rebooting it after using the said overclocking proggie would only push the system to a certain limit. In this case where everything was set at max and both the memory and the cpu running synchronously at 133mhz, the RedStorm overclocking utility could only take the system to 145mhz fsb while the manual overclocking works up to 156mhz fsb. One feature that I really like to mention is the DRV5's ability to automatically reboot itself to the default fsb setting when overclocking went over the limits. There was never any instance that I have to clear the CMOS after a failed overclock nor did I even have to press the insert button to get the default settings up again. This is the first board I have tested that has that particular positive behaviour. To sum it up, we were able to take the DRV5 rock solid up to 156mhz FSB at 133mhz and only 145mhz FSB at asyncronous 166mhz memory bus. Our Athlon XP 1600+ (1400mhz) running smoothly and solidly at 1712mhz (11x156mhz). That's already XP 2100+ speeds.
Facebook
Twitter