| ECS A770M-A (V1.0) AMD 770 Motherboard
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BIOS (continued):
The Frequency/Voltage Control menu allows the user to set the clock speed and system bus speed for the motherboard. These are usually determined by the type of processor that is installed in the system, and some fine tuning is possible with these menu options. The CPU Over-Clocking Function option allows you to adjust the frequency of the CPU starting at 200MHz and climbing all the way up to 500MHz in whole number increments. I was unable to locate any CPU multiplier options.
The final two options on the Frequency/Voltage Control menu allow the user to easily adjust the CPU and DIMM Voltage. This motherboard has the finest CPU and DIMM voltage control I have seen, although it could be slightly confusing to figure out. For the CPU voltage, each number is equal to 5mV (0.005V), which is extremely small. At the maximum you can increase the CPU voltage to 300mV (0.3V). The DIMM voltage is increased by 10mV (0.01V), again a very small amount. The maximum DIMM voltage adjustment is 630mV (0.63V). The biggest problem with this is there is no place that tells me the initial starting voltage. I will assume the starting value of the DIMM voltage is 1.8V, which would allow me to increase the DIMM voltage to around 2.4V which will be more than most would want, and enough to easily void any DDR2 warranty.
 
Overclocking:
Overclocking on the ECS A770M-A was met with very limited results. When I evaluate overclocking, I like to do it as simple as possible. This would match what an average user is capable of, without going through hours of testing and calculations. While you can get better overclocking results by fine tuning every aspect, I have found that the average user does not want to spend that amount of time. Usually I only adjust the basics (frequency and voltages) related to the CPU, memory, and frontside bus.
Starting with the "CPU Over-clocking Frequency" I adjusted it to 210MHz which allowed the system to post with all other items at stock settings, however it was unstable. At 211MHz the system would not post, and required clearing the BIOS. Eventually I settled on 208MHz as the stable speed.
For the next step I adjusted the CPU and RAM voltages to provide some additional power. Once again, at over 210MHz the system would not post. 208MHz was again the stable speed. Finally, I tried adjusting the RAM clock speed to 333MHz and received the same results.
With the same hardware installed on an Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard I was able to the adjust the CPU to run stable at 235MHz. This shows the hardware can be overclocked a little, but when installed in the ECS A770M-A I was barely able to get any overclocking out of it.
Attempting to overclock the same components when installed on another AMD 770 based motherboard, the Asus M3A, met with similar results as the ECS A770M-A. This leads me to wonder whether it is a limitation of the AMD 770 chipset, or on these motherboards, which aren't really designed with the overclocking enthusiast in mind.
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