Up until now, on my small LAN gaming rig (Black2Red) I’ve been using the Abit Fatality F-I90HD onboard graphics. The onboard GPU is an X1250 and it will happily run HL2:Deathmatch on my spare 15″ monitor, which is what we play at the LAN nights I host. However, I saw an XFX 7900GS going on ebuyer for £35 and decided to finally get a GPU for it. What I suspected right from the start and have now proven to be true is that using the onboard graphics was limiting the overclock of my E2160 on this motherboard.

My previous maximum overclock was 2.9ghz and only 2.8ghz fully stable. This is significantly less than I achieve on my other rig which doesn’t have an onboard GPU. OK, so the second rig (Blue Centurion) is based on an ASUS P5E3 Deluxe which cost about twice what I paid for the Abit F-I90HD but I’d still expect at least 3ghz stable from an E2160.

Now that I’ve got the 7900GS installed I’ve managed to reach 3.1ghz stable and 3.2ghz unstable in orthos but ok in windows and I haven’t yet begun to tweak the overclock with regard to finding the best voltages.

So now I’m hoping to find a nice 3+ghz overclock for my Black2Red rig and see how good the Abit board really is. You can be sure I’ll let you all know and I’m hoping at some point soon to do full reviews on the Abit motherboard and the XFX 7900GS graphics card.

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