Fan Noise

The ASUS M2A-VM is all passively cooled, so there is no fan noise. When the board is highly overclocked and the load on the system is changing, you can hear a quite loud electrical noise coming from the power circuitry of the board. This is with the motherboard running outside of a case, when installed inside a case you will probably not hear it.

Overclocking

Since the board does not offer many overclocking features in the BIOS, overclocking is quite limited. Changing the CPU frequency via the BIOS only let the board boot up to 225 MHz. We tested at a x5 multiplier, to make sure that the CPU is not limiting our maximum overclock.



Once it made it into Windows I could use SysTool to further overclock the system.
It seems PCI-E and PCI bus frequencies are not locked to 100 MHz / 33.3 MHz, which means that they quickly go out of spec when increasing clocks. Since there were no PCI/PCI-E cards installed for this testing we could still get the system to run at over 258 MHz, completely stable. While this is not much, it is still respectable for a low-end motherboard with a passively cooled chipset that is not designed for overclocking.

What I would like to mention is how great the recover from failed boot feature works. Just hold down the insert key and press the reset button and the system boots from safe BIOS settings. Not a single time during testing I had to clear the CMOS.