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OVERCLOCKING
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EasyTune overclocking.
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The bundled overclocking utility in Gigabyte's EasyTune worked properly, allowing
us to overclock the board from the Vista desktop without rebooting. Our past
experience with such programs have usually ended in disappointment so this was
a nice surprise. Unfortunately, the CPU frequency can only be increased in 1Mhz
increments — you can't enter in values manually. It took a lot of mouse clicks
to bring it up from 200 to 300Mhz.
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The MA78GM topped out at 330Mhz.
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Using EasyTune we increased the CPU frequency by 5Mhz until we encounted instability.
ATITool's artifact scanner was run briefly to verify there was no corruption
of the integrated graphics. The maximum CPU frequency the board was stable at
was 330Mhz, which is very impressive for an AM2+ mATX board. Note that we decreased
the CPU multiplier to 5x and the HT Link frequency to 600Mhz as we were trying
to max out the bus speed, not the processor itself. The maximum clock speed
the processor is capable of is irrelevant.
At 335Mhz, we began to see yellow artifacts in ATITool's artifact scanner,
and at 340Mhz the system crashed (or wouldn't boot up when overclocking via
the BIOS). Disabling the onboard video and using a discrete graphics card did
not help this result, nor did any additional chipset cooling. During testing,
the northbridge heatsink reached a balmy 68°C as measured by an infrared
thermometer.
HDMI OUTPUT
Connecting the board's HDMI output to our BenQ FP94VW LCD monitor was a relative
success. It allowed for resolutions of 800x600, 1152x648, 1280x720 and 192x01080,
but not the native resolution of 1440x900. 1152x648 was the closest without
the desktop going off the edge of the screen. The audio output worked properly
without any issues — a first for us.
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