AVL leidt ons de weg naar de Epox 7KXA review van Overclockers Australia. Onze australische vrienden zijn positief over de overklokbaarheid van de 7KXA, die naast de standaard 100MHz busspeed setting ook opties heeft voor 110 en 115MHz. Een 15% toename in FSB snelheid bleek de stabiliteit van de plank niet nadelig te beïnvloeden:
I could get an Athlon 650 to run stably at 110MHz but it would crash at 115MHz. I thought this might be a limit of the core, though, so I got Jim's Athlon 500 (which has been proven via a gold-finger device to be stable at 650) and cranked it up to 115MHz. It ran the Unreal Flyby with SETI in the background for a good couple of hours at this FSB, for a core speed of 575MHz. Not an exhaustive test, but it shows the chipset to be much more flexible in this regard than the AMD 750.
However, I can already hear the BX-board owners scoffing at a meagre 15% FSB increase. Hopefully this is a good omen for the chipset and other implementations will allow this to be pushed further. Since the K7M review a plethora of gold-finger devices have burst onto the market so you can put your soldering iron away - multiplier-based Athlon overclocking is now a no-brainer - but stable FSB adjustment gives you much finer control (once you've set your multiplier to something higher), a few extra MHz and, of course, the advantages of the overclocked memory, PCI, AGP etc.