Reliability

KT3 Ultra2 is a motherboard designed for users with high expectations. I also expected a lot from KT2 Ultra2 because it is manufactured by MSI. The BIOS features are important for most users so I will describe them first. The mobo has a design based on an AMI BIOS which is suitable for overclocking. Inside the BIOS you can find the following features:

• Frequency/Voltage Control area. Here you can set the FSB between 100Mhz and 220Mhz in 1Mhz increments, adjust the clock multiplier, increase the CPU voltage up to 1.850V in 0.025V increments, and change the DDR voltage between 2.5V, 2.6V, 2.7V and 2.8V. The level of tweaking offered to the user is not the best, but it can satisfy most enthusiasts. Unfortunately you don’t have access to multipliers, which can be very important in an overclocking session.
• Under Advanced Chipset Features there can be found the DRAM Timing control settings. You can select the DRAM clock, CAS# latency, Row precharge time, RAS pulse width, RAS to CAS delay, etc. The memory clock can be set between SPD, HCLK, HCLK+33, and HCLK+66.

As you can realize the memory clock can be set to more than 333Mhz, which is what we did in the stability tests. For oveclocking tests I used an AMD Athlon XP 2400+, a CPU which performed extremely good in the overclocking tests conducted on other motherboards. I increased the CPU voltage to 1.85V and the FSB to 143Mhz. The memory was also overclocked to 176Mhz (143Mhz + 33Mhz). I wanted to check the motherboard’s stability therefore I used three Corsair 400Mhz memory modules. Although the motherboard was overclocked, the memory was running below its specifications. The motherboard was not stable when all three slots were filled with memory while running at a 176Mhz memory bus. I removed one memory module and the stability improved, but it became rock stable only when I removed two memory modules. With only one memory slot used, the board became very stable and was able to run for more than 110 hours without any problem.

Overall the board is reliable; the CPU overclocking level is quite good, but you can not expect to overclock the memory interface to 400Mhz.