choosing an overclockable mobo

[twelvenine]

I'm putting together a new machine and i want it to be overclockable. I've been looking at mobos on newegg and stuff, but none of them list the bios in the specs. I figure that if they would list the bios, I could just look it up and see what kind of overclocking features it supports. How do you go about making sure a board is overclockable before you buy it? is just buying it from a certain manufacturer enough? or is it better to just to buy the bios separately?

also, what are the standard features that I should make sure to get? System clock, multiplier, and ram control for sure, but what about voltage control and bus dividers for controlling pci/agp/pcie speeds?

The last motherboard I bought was from ECS and it only had clock and clock:dram ratio control. do a lot of motherboards manage pci speed and voltage on their own? i was able to crank the clock up pretty high on that box without my pci cards malfunctioning and the processor must have been getting more voltage somehow.

 

[sofarfrome]

we need some more info here...what CPU do you plan on using?

 

[shirker]

any recent motherboard from the main manufacturers out there (abit, gigabyte, asus) will have a plethora of BIOS options, more than enough for even the serious overclocker. also, I don't think you can buy the bios separately?

system clock is controlled by multiplier and FSB speed, so that won't be a BIOS setting. multiplier control, fsb speed, fsb:dram divider, cpu voltage/vcore, memory voltage/vdimm, northbridge voltage, southbridge voltage, PCIe bus frequency, etc etc, ALL of those are found in pretty much any BIOS nowadays