1st Test

In our first test, all tested motherboards must achieve the highest overclocking speed with all the BIOS settings left to Auto. This means that each motherboard must calculate how much voltage the CPU needs in order to be absolutely stable while operating in higher clock speed. The memory dividers and the memory/FSB/MCH voltages are also left to Auto. In other words this is the easiest overclocking you can do. For this test we use a retail Intel E6600 with it's CPU multiplier locked at x9 and we raise the FSB until we get a perfectly stable system (Orthos2004+PovRay running). An additional 8cm fan was used for further cool the whole system.

Keeping the CPU multiplier at 9x, the P5K3 Deluxe WiFi achieved the highest CPU speed with all the BIOS settings left to Auto. The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi was somewhat lower with 3420MHz.

2nd Test

Apart from the maximum overclocking speed, we have to find the maximum possible FSB frequency with our used CPU. Again all BIOS settings are left to Auto and the CPU multiplier is dropped to 6x. The memory timings and the dividers are also left to auto. An additional 8cm fan was used for further cool the whole system.

The performance of all the tested motherboards was similar with 490MHz FSB for the P5E3/P5K3 Deluxe WiFi and 480MHz for the Blitz Extreme.

3rd Test

Our final overclocking test is intended to find how good a motherboard is in overclocking the memory. In this test we used one pair of SuperTalent's DDR3-1600CL7 with the following settings:

• Timings: 8-8-8-24-2T
• Voltage: 2.25V
• FSB:DRAM divider: 1:2
• Additional 8cm rotating fan
• All other BIOS settings left to Auto

By raising the FSB we tested the stability until we "hit the roof". All the tested motherboards had a similar performance, while the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi edition went somewhat higher...

- Overclocking stability

During our overclocking attempts, we didn't noticed any serious problems. The motherboard would post after any failure with the corresponding message prompting us to change the BIOS settings and simply try again.