Motherboards

Gigabyte S-Series GA-945P-S3 Motherboard Review

This system was tested with an Intel E6600 processor, 2GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-667, 2GB of A-Data DDR2-800 memory, and an XFX 7800 GTX video card.

Although the 945P uses slower DDR2-667 memory, it can still keep up with newer Intel chipsets with DDR2-800 RAM.

Overclocking
The 945 chipset does not feature CPU multiplier settings, which will introduce the CPU as the limiting factor when overclocking.  You pretty much have to use a “brute force” method when overclocking, by increasing the CPU and memory voltage as you increase the front side bus.  You should have good overclockable memory, and if you use DDR2-800 then you should be able to run the FSB up to that speed (if your CPU can handle it, which most Core 2 processors will).

 

The E6600 has a 9x multiplier, and we were able to overclock it from 2.4Ghz to 3.5Ghz very quickly without tweaking memory timings when using DDR2-800.  All we did was increase the voltage and front side bus.  The stability of the system is greatly influenced by active cooling on the northbridge.

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