Chipset

When the Wolfdale was launched, everyone jumped on P35 motherboards, resulting in a mass of people shouting out the words 'FSB Wall'. Just for fun, some others broke out their old trusty Commando and popped the E8x00 in. Surprisingly, a lot of people reported to go over 600FSB on air cooling!

After a lot of research, it turned out that the GTL+ voltage levels were better tuned for the Wolfdale processors. At first, this might come across as a little bit quirky, because the P965 is older than the P35. Well, think like this: the P35 was tuned for excellent Conroe performance and might have been too tuned for good Wolfdale overclocking. The P965 was only an update for the bad overclockability of the i975X.

We asked Asus to send us a Commando to test out how good the board actually is.

Board layout:





Voltage modifications

The Asus Commando does need some modifications when you want to absolutely max the board out. Underneath, you find the modifications for vcore and vdroop.



Results

Although we were only able to clock to 580MHz FSB (luck of the draw, or lack thereof), most people are able to clock a lot higher. 600FSB on air mostly is no problem (when you are handpicking a board, check the serial number: if it starts with '7C', you got a winner) and quite a lot even go beyond 650MHz FSB on ln².


(c) Duck

Check out the E8x00 top overclocking results, you'll be astonished by the percentage that uses an Asus Commando.