ASUS P5GD2 Premium Mainboard

A Bit of a Write Up on the ASUS P5GD2 for those who are interested.
You may wish to remove the ASUS stock Northbridge Passive Heatsink and install an Active Fan & Sink. Such as:
Can be found at:
http://www.thermaltake.com/coolers/chipset/a1163.htm

It will do the trick on those hot (after a good o/c) Northbridges.
The P5GD2 has adjustable system bus speed settings that fall within 100 to 400 MHz in 1 MHz increments.

The P5GD2 can be easily adjusted with settings for the processor voltage (Vcore) and these settings fall within an excellent range of 1.3875V to 1.7V in 0.0025V steppings.

The Vmem can be raised from from 1.8V up to 2.1V (in 0.1V increments).

The P5GD2 has the ability to raise the chipset core voltage to keep the memory translation stable and can be set to ranges of 1.5V and 1.6V.
The PCI-Express Bus frequency can be raised between 90MHz to 133MHz.

P5GD2 allows adjusting the value of "FSB Termination Voltage" with values of 1.2V and 1.4V.

This leads us to look at an area that is most important to overclocking, that being restricting the subsidiary busses to their specified values so that they do NOT concurrently raise along with the overclock. At increased overclocked speeds, it is necessary for the PCI bus speed to not exceed the specified 33 MHz. Without this many components using this bus can either fail or not perform correctly, especially sound and hard disks and even more so RAID arrays. Thus the P5GD2 has a setting to fix the PCI bus speed and lock it and I repeat this graphic for procedure.

BIOS Downloads as of Today:

P5GD2 Premium Beta BIOS v1010.002:
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket775/P5GD2 Premium/1010-002.zip

P5GD2 Premium BIOS 1009:
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket775/P5GD2 Premium/P5GD2P09.zip

Hope this is of benefit to someone,

R

Very nice post ropey, thanks again!

These settings are very much identical as the P5AD2-E Premium I have.

I'll agree that the Northbridge gets extremely hot, but it isn't a requirement to replace. Just make sure you have some airflow across it.

I've been running my bus at 300mhz for about 8 months now, straight. That's 1200mhz FSB!!!

And yes, that northbridge gets SOOO freakin' hot. But, I'm still using my "stock" NB heatsink, so it's perfectly fine.

I run my system almost 24/7, and I don't even have a heatsink/fan combo on my CPU (use watercooling)! So I am at a sever dis-advantage already for cooling of the NB heatsink. Intels specs that the OEM Heatsink/Fan combo from a Retail Intel cpu requires cooling of the surrounding VRMs (hence the way it was designed).

This setup also promotes nice airflow across the memory chips and the NB heatsink (amongst other heatsinks).


I was just making a point that the stock heatsink is adiquate (sp ck) on the NB.

nice nice i guess its time to get one of these since my mobo got shot recently

EDIT: after having one for 3 months the USB has died and sometimes it will get stuck on the boot screen. Im not very happy about this.

thanks

Anyone know the diff between the premium and non-premium?
All the reviews are on the premium

the only thing I want for x-Mas is...

a AWARD BIOS walkthru

American Megatrends seems to have more available info, maybe its just me.

I'm still looking for help in me thread: Overclocking on a P35C-DS3R (rev 1.x)

help someone will help soon

Excellent thread, great walkthrough and explanation of that board...