Dan’s ASUS P3V4X Best Settings

My setup:

CASE: I have an EAGLE tool-less case, with TWO 80MM INTAKE FANS at the bottom, TWO 80MM EXHAUST FANS at the top. Average case temp is 23C.

POWER SUPPLY: 450 WATT SERVER with TWO 80MM FANS of its own – one sucking heat from just above my Intel 500 E chip and one expelling it outside my case.

MOTHERBOARD: My current foundation is an ASUS P3V4X, 1004 BIOS.

PROCESSOR: 500E CHIP (overclocked to 750 MHz @ 1.40 V-Core setting), which runs at an avgerage 41 C under 100% CPU load. (Seti@Home).

HARD DRIVES: I use 2 WESTERN DIGITAL EXPRESS 9.1 GIG 7200 RPM hard drives.

PROMISE ULTRA66 FASTTRACK RAID: I run this in RAID (0), striped formation.

MEMORY: I employ two sticks of MUSHKIN PC 133 HSDRAM, 128 MB (256Megs).

GRAPHICS CARD: I’m currently using an ASUS DDR GEFORCE with my INTEL HEAT SINK AND FAN attached to its Graphics processing unit; +3.3 Voltage jumpered to +3.6 Volts; 5.14 Detonator Drivers.

SOUND CARD: Music arrives to my ears from a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum sound card attached to 4 CAMBRIDGE SATELLITES AND SUBWOOFER.

Optimizations – a lovely word to use. For me it means just messing about. Messing is the operative word here. I subscribe to the philosophy that one must thoroughly louse things up before understanding why they’re right.

I make no pretense that the following is free of error, or the ultimate in the utilization of hardware resources. But it does let me play Unreal Tournament at 750 MHz. And, unlike the thousand & 1 other configurations and settings that I’ve tried, it’s stable.

Shall we first waddle over to the benchmarks? As much of what we’re concerned with here is memory, and as memory performance alters with the use of cache, I shall run memory benchmarks three times, listing all three results. For CPU and multimedia CPU, I will run each benchmark three times, throwing out the high and low and posting the average score. All scores were taken from SiSoft Sandra.

First the CPU benchmark. This benchmark did not vary in three runs:

• CPU Dhrystone: 2020
• FPU Whetstone: 1004

CPU Multi-media benchmark: this benchmark did not vary in three runs:

• CPU Multimedia: 2359
• Floating Point: 3140

Memory Benchmark:

• CPU Memory Bandwidth: 407/415/403
• FPU memory Bandwidth: 486/483/457

Drives Benchmark:

I’m using a Promise RAID card, recently re-configured from 8 KB to 16 KB striping.

• Drive Index: 20,079/19,688/20,014

For the one or two of you who may live worthwhile lives and lack the time for “Optimizations”, I’ll post my BIOS settings. All settings not listed are set to default.

ADVANCED MENU:

• 1. CPU speed (MANUAL)
• 2. MULTIPLE (5.0)
• 3 SYSTEM/PCI FREQUENCY (150.0/37.50)
• 4. SYSTEM/SDRAM FREQUENCY RATIO (1/1)
• 5. CPU DECORE (1.40)
• 6. USB LEGACY SUPPORT (disabled)

CHIP CONFIGURATION MENU:

• 1. SDRAM CONFIGURATION (by SPD)
• 2. READ AROUND WRITE (ENABLED)
• 3. CPU -DRAM BACK -BACK TRANSACTION (ENABLED)
• 4. DELAYED TRANSACTION (DISABLED)
• 5. PCI TO DRAM PREFETCH (DISABLED)
• 6. BYTE MERGE (ENABLED)
• 7. PCI TO DRAM PREFETCH (ENABLED)
• 8. DRAM THE LATCH DELAY (0.0 ns.)
• 9 AGP COMPATIBILITY (4X MODE )
• 10. AGP FAST WRITE (DISABLED)
• 11. GRAPHICS APERTURE SIZE (128 MHz)
• 12. VIDEO MEMORY CACHE MODE (USWC)

PCI CONFIGURATION:

• 1. PCI LATENCY TIMER (64)
• 2. USB FUNCTION (DISABLED)
• 3. The VGA BIOS SEQUENCE (AGP/PCI)

SHADOWED CONFIGURATION MENU:

(ALL ENABLED)

HARDWARE MONITOR MENU:

• 1. VCORE VOLTAGE (1.45 set to IGNORE)
• 2. + 3.3 V VOLTAGE (3.66 set to IGNORE)
• 3. -5V VOLTAGE -5.25 set to (IGNORE)

BOOT MENU:

• 1. And PLUG & PLAY O.S. (YES)
• 2. BOOT UP FLOPPY UP SEEK (DISABLED)

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Its my feeling here that the Asus has finally brought the VIA chip set into the realm of excellence. VIA, I have absolutely no doubt, will receive all the attention it deserves from overclockers.

But ASUS cannot garner all the credit, MUSHKIN PC 133 HSDRAM, ENHANCED, is truly awesome. At a Front Side Bus of 150 MHz, SPD setting is 3,2,2 or about as good as it gets. I can’t imagine anyone who takes the time to mess about with the ins and outs of this board, could really be disappointed.

Email Dan