ASUS M2N68-AM PLUS review

Test setup and overclocking

Test setup

Processors	Athlon II X2 240 Phenom II X3 710
Motherboard I	ASUS M2N68-AM PLUS
Motherboard II	ASUS M4A78-VM
Motherboard II	M4A785D-M PRO
CPU Coolers	AMD stock cooler Cooler Master Hyper TX3 (one fan)
Hard disk	1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ
Memory	OCZ Platinum 2X 2048MB DDR2 PC2-8500 Corsair 2X1024MB DDR2 667MHz
Video Card	XFX Radeon 3650
OS	Vista home Premium 32 bit Windows 7 home premium 64 bit

Overclocking

The following table summarizes BIOS settings with an
athlon II X2 240 and Corsair 2X1024MB DDR2 667MHz.

CPU/HT reference clock	min 200MHZ - max 200MHZ
PCIE	min 100MHZ - max 150MHZ
Processor Frequency Multiplier	min 8X - max 14X (with the Athlon II X2 240)
CPU Over Voltage	Standard, + 50Mv, +100Mv
DRAM Timing Mode	Click here to view the DRAM Timing Mode
Memclock mode	min 200MHZ - max 533MHZ
Memory Over Voltage	[AUTO][Min 1.850000V][Max 2.24375V]
Chipset Over Voltage	Auto, +50Mv, +100Mv +150Mv

The athlon II X2 240 is no black edition and therefore has a locked multiplier, so we had to use the base clock to overclock it, we couldn't adjust the HT link because there are no BIOS settings for it.

This motherboard was very hard to overclock, even after placing a Coolermaster Hyper TX3 and setting the CPU voltage to MAX (+100Mv) we couldn't get our Athlon II 240 any higher than 3.06 GHz with a 219MHZ BCLK, this is an increase of only 9.5% !

In the BIOS there is a possibility to set the CPU Overclocking to [Overclocking Profile]. In that case the Overclocking Options are [Auto][Overclock 3%][Overclock 5%][Overclock 7%].
Usually (with other ASUS motherboards) the options are 10%, 20%, 30%, this shows that this mobo was not designed for (extreme) overclocking.

Search this site:

- ASUS M4N78-AM

- ASUS M4A785D-M

- ASUS P5G41-M

HOME - LINKS - CONTACT