Overclocking of the Biostar AMD GeForce 6100-M9

Surprisingly, the Biostar 6100-M9 had quite a few inbuilt options for overclocking - certainly more than you generally see on a micro-ATX motherboard which is fairly well budget orientated.

In theory, bus speeds can be clocked up to 300MHz, PCI-E speeds up to 125MHz, frame buffer up to 128MB, HyperTransport multiplier up to 5x, DRAM voltage up to 2.93V and core voltage up to 1.7V. This is the theory, at least.

Biostar have loaded the onboard Award BIOS with an overclocking feature called ONE - Overclocking Navigator Engine. This comes with three pre-defined overclocked settings - normal, medium and extreme. You do need to disable POST error halting to use this - otherwise the system halts on startup indicating a CPU frequency change.

Within the BIOS you can also backup your current BIOS settings, and restore them if things go wrong with the setup - a very useful safety net.

Biostar have provided software which leverages off their WarpSpeeder technology to enable in-OS overclocking. We had limited success with this - CPU frequency was able to be clocked higher, although the PCI-E frequency remained stubbornly low and refused to go any higher.

We found that trying to tweak the motherboard this way resulted in a fair few freezes and hangups. The best (and most stable) results were achieved by using the in-BIOS pre-defined settings. The Windows-based hardware monitoring utility was pretty good though, and very useful in keeping track of changes to the system.

We were able to get the board up to a stable FSB of 272MHz which isn't too bad.