| [M]adness |
HWFaq  |
| Contests |
| Search |
| Links |
| Sponsors |
| Send News |
  |
| Sponsors |
| .Priorweb |
| Arctic Silver |
| Asus |
| Caseking |
| CoolerMaster |
| Danger Den |
| Dollarshops |
| Geeks.com |
| Gigabyte |
| MSI |
| OCZ |
| PC-Cooling |
| Scythe |
| Swiftech |
| Tones |
| ||-More-|| |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
|
Now that we've got the basic stuff out of the way, here's where you'll want to spend most of your time: the "Extreme Tweaker" bios panel. As it basically consists out of a long list of OC functions, I had to make three screenshots to cover them all, and you find them on the three thumbnails below.    the complete "Extreme Tweaker" bios page First thing you have to decide on this bios page is how far you are willing to go in the overclocking world:  Asus provides a couple of "easy" OC settings, which should give the novice the opportunity to start overclocking their CPU a bit without hassle. As I'm not a very firm believer in these kind of OC adventures (and that's put lightly), we'll skip this part in this review. However, if you don't want a very big overclock, and you're happy with just a couple percent of extra speed, these settings reportedly do work, sort of ;-) A quick word on the "NOS" setting as well: NOS stands for Non-delay Overclocking System, and overclocks your system automatically when a power hungry application asks for it (in practice: when your cpu utilization goes to 100%). After the load is diminished, your system automatically reverts to its previous speed setting. So after you have wisely decided to use the manual settings, we're all set to start overclocking. Now let's go into detail on the most important OC options you can find on this page, and start with the CPU:     the complete CPU tweaking set On the above thumbnails you can find: As you can see, you can provide up to 1.90 Volts to the CPU, which means you will need some pretty serious cooling for your processor (that would be LN2 of course). The CPU VTT cannot be directly controlled, but is provided as a ratio towards the vcore settings. To be honest, the "auto" settings have worked great for me and I've never had a reason to use them, yet. The FSB strap settings influence the DDR ratios directly, and are as such useful. They do not, however, provide any benefit in your overclock, unlike the strap settings of the Intel bad Axe for example, where a manual relaxation of the chipset strap does provide a higher overclock. Load line calibration, finally, automatically provides higher current to the cpu when it is under load, thus diminishing the so-called "vdroop" effect, where voltages drop when a cpu is loaded, and which can lead to instability, especially when the cpu is overclocked. Front Side Bus tuning The standard front side bus frequency depends on the installed processor : an older Pentium D8xx for example would have a quad pumped frequency of 800Mhz (or 200Mhz bus speed), the current lineup of E6x00 cpu's have a 1066Mhz quadpumped bus, the recently introduced E6x50 cpu's have a faster 1333Mhz quad pumped bus. The Asus board fully supports the cpu's with 1333Mhz bus speeds of this and the next generation, as you can see in the board's specifications as well.      Front side bus bios settings These thumbnails address the following voltages: If you want to start raising the front side bus, you have to help your board a bit voltage-wise. The above settings do just that, and by increasing the voltages to northbridge, Southbridge and FSB VTT you can get very far already. Especially the front side bus VTT control is a very necessary setting, and needs to be tweaked just right, to reach higher front side bus speeds. Exactly which voltage you have to tune the VTT control to depends on your specific processor, and there are no "good for all" settings. Finally, the Northbridge PLL setting is a rather new voltage setting that enables you to squeeze the last MHz out of your cpu. Its effect is rather modest in my book, but it does work. For reference, the best results I got were with PLL voltages of about 1.7V, northbridge at 1.6, and FSB VTT at 1.44Volts. Last but not least : have a look at the following screen shot :  Transaction booster - behind the scene overclocking The transaction booster is a rather difficult setting, and is not as easy to explain, also because Asus is quite tightly lipped about this one. When you are familiar with the Memset utility (if you're not, please take the time to do so, as it's an excellent utility indeed), you will notice that Felix has added a "performance level" setting in the latest versions. The tweaking of this performance level reportedly has the same effect as the tweaking of the transaction booster. This setting seems to have an impact on the internal timings of the northbridge chip. By relaxing the timings, your chipset should be able to overclock a little further, while tightening the timings should result in a slightly faster system. The trick is of course finding the right balance of these two. The Asus board provides you with an "auto" setting, and a 3-fold increase or decrease of the transaction booster. In my opinion, Asus has done an excellent job with the auto setting, striking the balance between speed and OC-ability just fine. On the other hand, if you want the last bit of front side bus speed, you can try to relax ("disable") the chipset a little, which indeed seems to work to some extent. Enabling the transaction booster however proved a lot more difficult: while enabled only a very slightly overclocked system would still boot, let alone be stable after booting. Memory tuning Important to know here is that the Asus Blitz gives you a standard setting as well, which isn't shown here, but which gives the board control over the memory timings. For this review I put everything on manual control, which lets you tweak the main memory timings yourself. The memory options on the P35 chipset are certainly not the most extensive ones I've ever seen (nForce 4 did much better here), and are basically the same as the P965 provided before. The main options (and a little more) are of course there.     Some Ram bios settings These settings let you tune the following (from left to right) : Unlike the nVidia 680i and ATi/AMD RD600 chipsets, there are no front side bus independent memory speeds available on the P35. As with P965 and P975, front side bus and memory are linked by a divider. You have the "straight" divider of 1:1, and above that the Blitz offers a 5:4 and 3:2 dividers as well. A "negative" divider where the memory runs slower than the FSB is not available. Like all the latest nVidia boards, Intel has added an option to tweak the command rate of the memory. You can set a "command per clock" of 1 cycle now as well; however, to cut through the chase, it doesn't seem to do much good. In my opinion you will be better served with a command rate of 2 cycles, which gives comparable OC results to the older P965 chipset. Another newer feature of the latest enthusiast motherboards is the ability to tweak the voltages of the memory independently per bank. This means that in a dual channel memory setup, when both your modules do not offer the same performance for a given voltage (which would be logical), you can increase (or decrease) voltages for one of the two modules a little. A great feature, but of very limited use. Finally, please remember that the JEDEC's specifications for DDR2 memory are something like 1.8 Volts... This means that putting over 3 volts through your DRAM modules might shorten the lifespan rather dramatically. Voltages up to 2.2-2.4 Volts should be safe depending on the memory chips you are using, but please be careful. Time for some testing ->  More reviews in this category can be found below: |
||
|
|
Copyright © 2001-2010 Madshrimps / JMkeOC.com, All rights reserved.
Graphical Design by Dennis Kestelle, Programming by John Meys, Paul Meys and Frederik Colardyn, Overall Site design by John Meys
All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.
BTW-BE 0888919678
Graphical Design by Dennis Kestelle, Programming by John Meys, Paul Meys and Frederik Colardyn, Overall Site design by John Meys
All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.
BTW-BE 0888919678
|
ADS by G | |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
 |
Search Madshrimps |  |
 |
 |
|
|
|
||
 |
 |
|
Daily News | |
|
|
|
|
Hardware TPM Hacked... Chinese Site Copies... Configure Your Comp... Seagate debuts the ... AMD to Sample 32 nm... NVIDIA Optimus - Tr... Windows 7 Battery N... Asus jumps the gun,... MSI Shows Passive C... AMD's ATI Radeon HD... Intel's Sandy Bridg... Intel Core i7 660UM... AMD reveals Fusion ... MSI P55-GD55: A Mai... AMD Reveals More Ll... AMD’s Radeon HD 557... Gigabyte HD 5670 OC... Sapphire HD 5570 1 ... Powercolor HD 5870 ... [M] MSI P55-GD80 en...
|
||
|
|
|
Sponsor Space: | |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
New Content | |
|
|
|
|
Articles/Reviews: USB 3.0 and SATA 6G... MSI Wind U135 Revie... Intel Clarkdale CPU... Three AMD 785G Moth... Vidabox Premium Wir... OCZ Throttle 32Gb e... Seven Intel P55 Mot... RAID 0 Stripe Sizes... Gigabyte Geforce GT... Intel Clarkdale vs ... Swiftech Apogee XT ... LanCool PC-K58 ATX ... Larkooler Universal... MSI GTX 275 Lightni... MSI Geforce GTX 275... Howto and Guides: Building a 300W Fan... NVIDIA Geforce 8400... NVIDIA Geforce 8800... Reviving and Volt M... Protect the core of... |
||
|
|