Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS Motherboard

The HotHardware Test Bed Athlon 64 Power

Overclocking the Foxconn 755A01-6EKRS Motherboard A Little Can Add Up

With its lack of voltage settings, we weren't expecting the 755A01 to be a stellar overclocker.  Any hope of trying to get a little aggressive with voltage adjustments was simply out of the question, but we rolled the dice to see what we could do anyway.  Ultimately, the system would POST with the motherboard's clock generator set to 220MHz (10 x 220MHz = 2.2GHz), but none of our benchmarks would run, often causing a system lock.  In the end, we reduced the clock generator to 215MHz (10 x 215MHz = 2.15GHz) and found the sweet spot.  At this lower setting, we managed to stabilize the system while enjoying a modest 7.5% performance gain.

Synthetic Benchmarking with SiSoftware's SANDRA 4 The Quick and Dirty

To get the benchmarking started, we typically like to run a few of the modules from Sisoftware's SANDRA benchmarking suite.  SANDRA allows us to get a quick idea of how a board fits in with its peers.  SANDRA utilizes a large database to reference and compare a system's results, giving a basic picture of what we should expect.  For this we ran the CPU, Multimedia and Memory performance modules. 

    
CPU, Multimedia & Memory @ Stock Speeds

    
CPU, Multimedia & Memory @ Overclocked Speeds

There isn't too much surprising here.  Performance at stock speed was what we would expect, in-line with the reference systems.  What was more interesting was the performance improvements when we raised the clock generator to 215MHz.  The end result was an increased processor speed from 2.0GHz to 2.15GHz.  The CPU and Multimedia modules registered gains that competed well against a Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz.in arithmetic instructions and a Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz across the board.  The memory test also registered a decent increase, adding over 300 points to both the integer and floating point results.

FutureMark's PCMark04 Full System Assessment

PCMark04 is useful tool for assessing a motherboard's overall performance potential.  This test assess the 4 key components related to system performance, issuing a score for each, and an overall score.  The test gauges CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard Drive performance.  We ran PCMark04 on the Foxconn 755A01 and an MSI K8T Neo based on the VIA K8T800 chipset for comparison.

The SiS755 based board competed quite well when compared to the popular K8T800 chipset.  In the total score, the Foxconn model took the top seed by a small margin.  We found the CPU results were a dead heat, while the Foxconn model boasted better memory results overall.  The clincher was the Graphics performance which surged past the VIA veteran, topping it by close to 400 PCMarks.  Conversely, we saw a marked drop in hard drive performance with the SiS755, where it was about 1/3 slower than the MSI board.