
Get the newsletter ChannelProSMB.com SystemBuilderPro.com Motherboards.org

ASUS P7P55D-E Premium Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

11-15-2009 · Category: Motherboards

By Elric Phares

ASUS uses a modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS on their ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard. The top menu is split into Main, Ai Tweaker, and Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools and Exit submenus. The Main menu has the Date, Time, Storage Configuration and System Information submenus. The Storage Configuration is where you set your HDDs to RAID or AHCI.

Battery

The Advanced menu has the CPU Configuration, Uncore Configuration, Onboard Devices configuration, USB Configuration, PCIPnP, Intel VT-d and T-Probe menus. The CPU Configuration screen identifies the CPU used, the amount of cache, the CPU Ratio setting, and the various features of the CPU including CIE, the CPU Ratio, the Virtualization technology, Turbo Boost mode and more.

The tweaking on the system is mainly done in the Ai Tweaker menu. Ai Overclock gives you four choices: Manual, Auto, DOCP, and XMP. DOCP overclocks the memory by adjusting the Base Clock frequency (BCLK). XMP stands for eXtreme Memory Profile the CPU BCLK, Ratio and memory parameters will be auto optimized by the XMP profiles stored in the SPD. The DRAM Frequency sets the memory frequency at Auto, DDR3-800, DDR3-1066 or DDR3 1333MHz which is the maximum that the Lynnfield CPUs can support natively. Third Party OC utility allows other vendor’s OC utilities to be used while ASUS OC utility can only use ASUS specific hardware and software to overclock without penalty. Using ASUS’s TurboV EVO overclocking utility I was able to overclock the CPU to 3.54GHz which is almost a 1GHz overclock over the standard 2.66GHz that the Core i5 750 achieves.