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BFG nForce 4 Ultra Motherboard
Overclocking
You have no further to look than the BIOS before its apparent that the BFG nForce4 Ultra isn't meant to be an overclocker's board. You won't find elaborate control over memory dividers. Rather you get a simple memory index setting to accommodate standard memory speeds such as 133,166 or 200. You can set memory timings to make sure you have appropriate clock timings for your setup and you can also control memory voltage up to 2.8V. In addition to the memory options above, you also have control over the voltages for the CPU and chipset. Your main overclocking option on the nForce4 Ultra is the Processor Frequency option in the BIOS which allows you to set! the processor frequency. This is another name for the system bus speed as it is used for the entire system rather than just the processor. Any increase in this setting will affect the CPU, memory and HyperTransport speeds. For the best overclocking performance on the BFG nForce4 Ultra you will want to use memory that you can overclock in step with the CPU. DDR500 for example should allow you to run at up to a 250 system bus speed with the 200MHz memory index used. If your memory doesn't run much over 200MHz, then you will need to set the memory index lower to give you some headroom to work with. This will allow you to overclock the CPU, but your memory performance could very well be lower. This may be OK for some applications, but those sensitive to memory performance could perform slower despite an increase in CPU speed. To find the top overclock on the nForce4 Ultra I started at a 220MHz system bus and worked by way up in 10MHz increments. The Corsair Xpert memory is capable of running at 250MHz with 3-3-3-8 timings so I went with a 1:1 overclock meaning my memory speed is the same as the CPU frequency. I had no problems at 220MHz and at 230MHz I simply had to tweak the CPU voltage a bit. At 240MHz, the system wouldn't run Prime95 for more than 15 minutes no matter how I set the various voltages or timings. I started working backwards in 1Mhz steps and found that a 238MHz CPU frequency was the highest I could achieve. This put my 3500+ Athlon 64 up from the stock CPU speed of 2200MHz to 2618MHz; a 19% increase in processor speed. This also put the system bus 4MHz higher than I could achieve with the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme motherboard. Doom3 and Half-Life 2 were rerun and compared to the stock-speed scores to get an idea of what performance benefit the overclock gives.  
Half-Life 2 @ 1024 x 768 (With Sound)
(Show All Graphs)
93
83
0
FPS
120
93
83
0
FPS
120
91
81
0
FPS
120
Half-Life 2 @ 1600 x 1200 (With Sound)
(Show All Graphs)
88
80
0
FPS
120
78
73
0
FPS
120
71
67
0
FPS
120
Doom 3 @ 1024 x 768
(Show All Graphs)
134
121
0
FPS
150
108
105
0
FPS
150
73
73
0
FPS
150
Doom 3 @ 1600 x 1200
(Show All Graphs)
72
71
0
FPS
100
55
55
0
FPS
100
39
39
0
FPS
100
Especially in Half-Life 2 we see decent performance gains with lower video resolution and AA/AF settings. With both benchmarks, when we really crank things up, the gain is negligible or even non-existent. This points to a lack of horsepower available to us from the video card. With a more powerful card, we should see performance increase more linearly with clock speed.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout Page 3: Bundle and Extras Page 4: Test Setup and Synthetic Benchmarks Page 5: Real-World Benchmarks Page 6: Overclocking Page 7: Conclusion 
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