ASUS P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi AP Edition Review :: Asus P5K3 Deluxe Wi-Fi AP BIOS and Overclocking

The P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi AP has the standard AMIBIOS found on most Asus motherboards with modifications set specifically for Asus to make tweaking the motherboard easy. The BIOS screen has Main, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools and Exit as Tabs. The Main screen has the Time, Date, Legacy Diskette A, Language, SATA devices detected, SATA Configuration and System Information listed. The SATA Configuration screen gives you the option to Configure SATA as Compatibility Mode or Enhanced. Enhanced gives you the option to configure SATA devices as RAID, IDE, AHCI. The System Information tab gives you the BIOS Version, Build Date, Processor and System memory information.

Battery

The Advanced tab has the JumperFree Configuration, USB Configuration, CPU Configuration, Chipset Configuration, Onboard Devices Configuration and PCIPnP Configuration menus. Here is where the overclocking on the board is done in the Jumperfree Configuration menu. The submenus include AI Overclocking, CPU Ratio Control, Ratio CMOS Setting, FSB Setting, PCIE Frequency, DRAM Frequency, DRAM Timing Control and other settings. Ai Overclocking has auto, preset settings and Manual settings. The tweaker will want to use the Manual setting. CPU Ratio control will give an option to change the CPU Ratio. Ratio CMOS Setting changes the FSB of the CPU with a range up to 800MHz. Of course, no CPU can reach that high such a lofty speed, but it’s ready for when the CPUs are. PCI Express Frequency can be set from 100-150MHz. With the Strap setting you can set the memory divider separately from the FSB Frequency. Early versions of the BIOS for this board did not allow this. Memory settings are very loose and flexible with this board. Here’s a list of them below.

• CAS Latency 3-6
• RAS to CAS Delay 3-10
• RAS Precharge 3-10
• RAS Activate to Precharge 3-34
• TWR 1-15
• TRFC 20, 25, 30, 35, 42
• TWTR 1-15
• TRRD 1-15
• TRTP 1-15
• Command Rate: 1T, 2T

Voltage options are:

• CPU Voltage 1.1-1.7v in 0.0125v increments
• CPU PLL Voltage 1.5v-1.8v in 0.1v increments
• DRAM Voltage: 1.8v-2.55v in 0.05v increments
• FSB Termination Voltage: 1.2-1.5v in 0.1v increments
• NB Voltage: 1.25v-1.7v in 0.15v increments
• SB Voltage 1.05v or 1.2v

Overclocking on this board was easy and pain free. With air cooling I was able to hit over 500MHz FSB by turning down the CPU Ratio. The alternate E6750 CPU we use for testing was able to hit over 3GHz on air cooling as well. The nice thing about the Asus board is it has a CrashFree BIOS which recovers the CPU settings if you overclock too far and can’t start the system again at that high of a clock. Simply restart the computer and it’ll set the CPU to default settings and your back in business.

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