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Page 3 of 3
The BIOS
Since this is an enthusiast board, we weren't suprised when we found a host of overclocker friendly options in the BIOS. The vCore can be adjusted from 1.225v all the way up to 1.7v in 0.0125v increments. You can adjust how much juice you want to pump into your RAM modules from 1.8v to 2.4v in 0.05v steps. The voltage to the northbridge (dubbed MCH chipset voltage) can be adjusted from 1.5 to 1.65v in 0.05 steps. Voltage to the southbridge (ICH chipset voltage) can be alternated between 1.05v and 1.2v. RAM can be run at DDR2 400/533/667/711/800/889/1067 MHz. It even allows adjustment of the FSB voltage.A comprehensive range of RAM timing adjustments can be found under the chipset menu. Under this menu is an option called "Hyper Path 3". While experimenting with it, we found that it caused nothing but trouble when set at "auto" so if you decide to buy or already have this board, we strongly recommend disabling this option.
Overclocking
By now you're probably dying to know how we faired overclocking with this board. Well, good things come to those who wait
Our test setup consisted of the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard and the following components:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 engineering sample cooled with Intel reference HSF
- 2 x 1 GB Team Xtreem PC2 5300 RAM
- 256 MB Connect 3D X1800XT
- 80 GB and 300 GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA hard drives
- NEC ND 3500 AG DVD-RW drive
- Antec TruePower 2.0 550W 12v EPS server PSU
The E6300 has a default frequency of 1.86 GHz using a 266 MHz FSB and a multiplier of 7. By pumping as much juice into the chipset as we could using the BIOS (1.65v in this case), we were able to get a rock stable 400 MHz out of the motherboard. 400 MHz was cold-bootable and our CPU was 100% prime stable at 400 x 7 (2.8 GHz). That's over a 50% increase in clock speed.
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