<font size="2"><span class="content"> <p>Raja and Kris have been busy in the labs working on ways to improve overclocking with the current X48, P45, and 790i chipsets. We are not looking at traditional methods like improved cooling methods, greater voltages, or handpicking components to give us the best possible results. Instead, we are taking a look at components utilized on current motherboards, speaking with the chipset design teams, and working with the BIOS engineers to determine the best possible way to improve clocking rates of not only the chipsets, but the processor and memory also.</p> <p>As a result of this effort, we will publish a technical article on our first findings along with the motherboard modifications we implemented to improve both CPU and memory clocks without resorting to increased voltages or exotic cooling to improve the performance of off the shelf components. In the meantime, we are providing a glimpse today into the world of oscillators and PLL chips along with some preliminary memory clocking results.</p> <p><strong>First Results</strong></p> <p>Samsung is introducing new high speed DDR3 ICs that have been generating a lot of interest at the very high end. Corsair publicized stock and overclocked results with their upcoming DDR3-2133 kit recently. These particular speeds are impressive and certainly surpass results obtained with Micron's latest D9JNL IC using reasonable voltages for memory, but also MCH, PLL, and VTT voltages on the X48 chipset.</p> </span><br /> </font> <p><font size="2">fter making a few minor changes to the P5E3 Premium X48 based board, we are able to operate our excellent Micron based DDR3-1866 kit from Cell Shock at DDR3-2160 at 8-8-8-24 2N on 2.02V. Our CPU voltage is 1.375V (we can go lower on this), 1.71V on the MCH, and PLL is set to 1.6V, significantly under voltage settings required on the Samsung kits at DDR3-2133 at 9-9-9-24 1N. These modifications work with a variety of memory kits from OCZ, Patriot, Corsair, and others at various speed ratings. This includes 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB configurations on standard BIOS releases with each kit seeing up to a 10% increase in clock speeds at tighter timings, all on reduced voltages compared to a stock board.</font></p> <p><font size="2">ASUS sent us a new BIOS that provides additional MCH clock skew settings (independent skew for each memory slot) that should allow us to go higher when overclocking 4GB or 8GB of memory. Also, we expect to see significant improvements with the new Samsung kits. We will provide full test results including application benchmark results in the coming article. In the meantime, here is some technical information behind the components we modified and why.</font></p> <p><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=449">Read more...</a></p> <p><font size="2"><br /> </font></p> <span class="content"> <p><br /> </p> </span>