ASRock 775Dual-880Pro
Although ASRock motherboards aren't designed for achieving any high overclocks, which is very evident from the BIOS, we were still fairly pleased with our overclocking results for being limited on the CPU voltage. Using a Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) and OCZ DDR PC4000 (2 x 1GB), we still managed to successfully clock the FSB to 227MHz, which resulted in a 405MHz overclock (227MHz x 15). We had maxed out the Front Side Bus at 236MHz (3540MHz), however, when doing so resulted in stability problems when gaming. With a maximum FSB of 227MHz, which hadn't possessed any stability issues, we also tampered with the DDR voltages for reference. When switching between auto, high, normal, and low for the DDR voltages we noticed absolutely no difference in the stability, performance, or overclocking ability. As expected, the overclocking options were rather lax but at least with stock voltages we did manage to run the Pentium 4 530 at 3.4GHz without faults. As the testbed was open air and actively had a 120mm fan blowing over the motherboard, we experienced no heat-related issues.
When overclocking, or even running stock speeds, monitoring the system temperature, voltages, and fan speeds is necessary. When using LM_Sensors for monitoring the hardware health, and using sensors-detect to detect the available sensors equipped on the motherboard, as ASRock doesn't offer any Linux support, we managed to probe the two temperature sensors (CPU and motherboard), two fans (CPU and chassis), and the different voltages (Vcore, +3.33, +5.00, +12.00). However, when displaying the real-time data, fan1 was displaying zero RPMs while the +12V rail was reading at 11.2V. Both of which values were incorrect; as the respectable values were displayed in the BIOS and we had used a digital multimeter and fan monitor to externally measure the values.