Overclocking
Overclocking on SK8V is a largely CPU limited affair. With 1.55V VID and 0.15V extra adjust, you've got up to 1.7V to play with which turned out to be 1.75V as the test SK8V overvolted slightly. That's all you'll reasonably want to put through your expensive FX-51 with air cooling.So with FID adjust up and down the range, it was simple to find a target frequency the test processor was happy at. 12x was easy enough, 13x a no go, so ~2.5GHz was the aim.
Given K8T800 doesn't lock PCI and I had XMS3500R, rated to 233MHz, 2500 / 225 (where most K8T800 tends to stop due to no PCI lock) gives 11.11 and a strong hint that sticking to 11x is going to yeild the best results.
Here's the final result.
FX-54?
Of course the memory was happy there too at default Vdimm.
That was enough for 23500 3DMarks with some overclocking on the 9800XT, along with my first ever < 50s HEXUS Pifast time.
In short, the SK8V gives you the tools you need for decent overclocking, especially multiplier based. No PCI lock means you're limited to ~225MHz in that respect. The K8T800 Pro revision of SK8V will help there, locking both AGP and PCI (both busses). The Promise controller, like with K8V, is apparently on the locked secondary bus, so give that a shot if you're experimenting with overclocking.
