jmke

Irrespective of cost versus performance ratios, even the smallest gains are more than enough to convince the enthusiastic front line benchmarkers and PC enthusiasts that DDR3 based motherboards are a justified purchase. However, finding the right motherboard to fill the role of extreme benchmarking can be a challenge to say the least. Out of the box, nearly all motherboards that fall into the mid/low-end of the market are unsuitable for extreme benchmarking - unless the user applies voltage modifications to them. Let's not forget the risks of voltage modifications; often users push the components used on the budget-oriented offerings far past their specifications, which seriously reduces component life spans. In addition to this, most moderately priced motherboards lack or do not provide full control over some of the chipset registers that are needed to fine tune system stability/performance at break-neck Front Side Bus (FSB) and CPU speeds.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3172

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