ECS A780GM-A Motherboard Review

Overclocking with the ECS A780GM-A was a challenge. I started off in the BIOS by lowering the Hyper Threading Frequency a bit and upping the the CPU speed to 210MHz, which would be an effective 2.415GHz (210x11.5) with a voltage increase to 1.4v. Even with just little bit, the computer would not boot without blue screening. I lowered the memory speed down and I was able to get into the OS, but only for a few seconds before the Blue Screen showed its ugly head again. Since the BIOS does not allow you to change the multiplier, I was at a loss. I then thought about AMD Overdrive. Even with AMD Overdrive, any addition to the CPU speed, no matter what I changed, the system would freeze and reboot. I finally was able to get the system stable by changing the multiplier in AMD Overdrive to 13.5x, dropping the Hyper Threading multiplier to 8x, and keeping the CPU speed at 200MHz for a 2.7GHz overclock @ 1.36v. The downfall is I had to decrease the memory clock speeds to 800MHz to keep the system stable, but I was able to tighten the timings to 5-4-4-12, which gave me a pretty good overclock in the Scientific Benchmarks.