Asus Blitz Extreme Review

I never thought I would be able to pull more performance out of my existing hardware. My CPU has hit walls from 440 to 470 FSB on other boards but usually I could coax another 5 FSB from it with extreme voltages. As it turns out, the old Quad had a little more life left in it after all. 490 x 7 was stable in Memtest 1.70 but would crash upon loading Windows. Lowering the clocks a little further resulted in a boot into Windows at 484 x 7. Not only did this clock speed boot into Windows, but was Prime 95 stable for over 24 hours as well. Voltages on the northbridge, CPU and CPU PLL were increased to gain stability at this clockspeed. A nice little feature in the BIOS is the color coding of the miscellaneous voltages. Green, of course, for normal, Yellow for high and Red for crazy. This gives you an indication of what levels Asus thinks are "safe" and which are not. Overclocking the memory did not require a whole lot of tweaking to get the memory to perform. By focusing on the CPU clocks I ran the memory slower than it is capable of. This memory does indeed push to 940MHz on this board with timings of 8-7-6-20 at 1.96volts. Pushing the limits on the Asus Blitz Extreme was not a problem. The crash recovery requires just a shutdown and reboot. This takes you back to the default settings, so the next boot is trouble free. Kind of refreshing if you ask me. If it does get to the point where the simple reboot does not work, there is always the clear CMOS button on the I/O panel just in case. The final clock speed of 484 x 7 is the most "Extreme" clockspeed that my Q6600 has ever been able to achieve.