Finally, the board can dish out up to 3.3V to your ram. I would strongly recommend against trying this, but I do have some OCZ PC4000 Gold that can actually take 3.3V. Paired with this motherboard, the two turned out to be a monstrous combination, but that’s for another review. Suffice to say, the 4PDA2+ can max out even the world’s most exotic memory.
Surely with a nuclear reactor’s worth of voltage, this board must be a formidable overclocker right? You better believe it. Using just a Zalman CNPS7000Cu HSF, and only the motherboard's passive North Bridge sink, I started at 250mhz FSB and gradually increased FSB and Vcore. 270mhz FSB passed, the 275, then 280. My 2.4C was now running at 3.36ghz. This is near the point where most Springdales and Canterwoods quit, and I thought that the Epox would be the same, but I was wrong. 285mhz passed, then 290, then 295, with the CPU running at 3.54ghz. Remember, this is just with air cooling, and a passive NB sink. I went up 1mhz at a time from 295mhz, and the board kept right on booting into Windows, all the way up to 300mhz FSB, where windows became unstable. Vcore was at 1.725V. I could’ve added more, but with the CPU above 50 degrees C, I figured that 300mhz was enough. I can only imagine what this board would be capable of with a water cooled CPU and North Bridge, but its abilities with just basic air (no tornado fan, just a 2500rpm Zalman) were astonishing.
To the benches!
