Holly KA32W

As far as overclocking goes, Holly is selling the KA32W with all components clocked to their defaults. Since different software will stress the components in different ways, it doesn't guarantee the machine to be stable at any settings other than the defaults, but, significantly, it does guarantee the components against failure from overclocking.

With the CPU voltage tweaked upwards by 0.1V we found our review machine stable with the front side bus running at 225MHz, making for an impressive 3.6GHz. At this speed, the overall application benchmark score came in at 2.19, rendering the KA32W notably faster than the first Prescott system we've seen (see p54).

Obviously, you pay for the privilege of owning something you can overclock to exceed the performance of the best standard components Intel has to offer, while the water-cooling will make future upgrades tricky, but for a very, very fast and quiet system that looks great, the KA32W is difficult to beat.

Author: David Fearon