ASUS P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

Asus outfit their boards with the American Megatrends AMIBIOS with a few modifications for their specific branding. Their BIOS is broken up into Main, Ai Tweaker, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools and Exit submenus. The Main submenu has the Date, Time, Legacy Diskette A, Language, SATA Configuration and System Information menus. SATA can be configured when set to Enhanced mode. Compatible mode allows for 4 SATA ports running in IDE emulation, Enhanced allows up to 6 SATA devices. Enhanced Mode allows configuration of SATA drives as IDE, RAID or AHCI modes.

System Specs

System Specs 2

The Ai Tweaker submenu has all the available overclocking settings. If you want the BIOS to automatically overclock the system you can use the Ai Overclock Tuner, but the enthusiast will want to use the Manual setting. Changing the CPU Ratio is controlled by the Ratio CMOS setting, setting the multiplier. FSB is set by the FSB Frequency setting. DRAM Frequency is where you would change the memory speeds based upon the strap setting. FSB Strap to North Bridge allows you to change the memory setting based upon the FSB of the motherboard.

Here are the settings for the overclocking:

FSB Settings: 200-800MHz
DDR3 Settings 667/800/835/886/1002/1067/1111/1333MHz
FSB Strap 200/266/333/400MHz
PCIe Settings 100MHz-150MHz
CPU Voltage Settings: 0.85V TO 1.70v in 0.00625V increments
Memory Voltage Settings 1.50v to 2.78v (in 0.02v increments)
FSB Termination Voltage Settings (1.25v to 1.91v in 0.015v increments)
NB Voltage settings 1.25v to 1.91v in 0.02v increments
SB Voltage settings 1.05v, 1.20v
Ai Clock Twister: Light, Moderate, Strong
Ai Transaction Booster: Enabled, Disabled

Loadline Calibration; Auto (default), Enabled, Disabled
Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs)

The range of over voltages available on the board is:

CPU: 1.10-1.70V @ 0.00625V increments
CPU PLL Voltage: Up to additional +2.78V
FSB: 1.20-1.50V
RAM: 1.50-2.78V
Northbridge: 1.25V-1.91V
Southbridge: 1.05V-1.20V

As you can see, the overclocking options are designed for the serious tweaker and enthusiast. FSB settings go up to 800MHz (unattainable at the moment on any Intel CPU but the setting is there ready for it), a PCI Express increase can increase the available bandwidth to the video card up to 50%. The Ai Clock Twister adjusts the aggressiveness of the memory settings. The Ai Transaction Booster regulates how aggressive the system tries to overclock the system when Ai Boost is enabled.

The ASUS P5E3 board was completely stable at the stock settings of the CPU and graphics card (8800GTS 320MB) that we use in testing. But the enthusiast doesn’t want or need default clocked CPUs in their system and is interested in how far the CPU overclocks. The P5E3 Deluxe performed extremely well in the overclocking department. The 3.2GHz Yorkfield successfully overclocked to 4.202GHz, a little over 913MHz over default clock. But more impressive was the FSB overclock of 467MHz by first increasing the multiplier to 9 from 8 defaults and overclocking the FSB without upping the core voltage of the CPU. On the Coolermaster Hyper-TX2 air cooler we use for testing this produced a CPU Temperature of 42 degrees Celsius. The system was totally stable at 4113MHz, producing an increase of over 4000 CPU Marks in Aquamark 3 with no visual artifacts during the run.