- Joined
- Dec 4, 2002
- Location
- CT
Overclocking your machine may damage it, do not contact me and tell me you blew up your rig trying something you read about here. Following any of the steps below is totaly your responsability.
A lot of new (to the P5W DH) people have been asking me about overclocking on the P5W DH Deluxe so I thought a quick start guide for these folks would be a good idea. This guide is not meant for the hardcore folks who have been around for a while and I claim no special knowledge of the P5W DH Deluxe, these are my own experiences in OCing with this board. Please note I am running the 1602 BIOS, you may have some slightly different options depending on your BIOS version!
The screen shots below will be familar once you go into your BIOS and start looking around at all of the options ASUS has given us to play with. The most important thing for people new to OCing to remember is do not change something in the BIOS without knowing what it does, you can get yourself into trouble quickly. That being said you also need to keep in mind that most of us learned by breaking stuff
We'll take the screen shots one at a time with a breakdown on the important stuff under each image.
First up is System Frequency and Voltage. Setting AI Overclocking to manual will allow you to change CPU Frequency and DRAM Frequency. As you can see my rig is running a 350 Mhz FSB which is yeilding a 875Mhz DDR2 Frequency. Keep in mind your dealing with DDR2 ram so applications like CPU-Z will show half of this speed or 438Mhz for the ram. We are also dealing with Intel's quad pumped FSB so expect to see 1400 Mhz for the FSB using CPU-Z. My chip is the C2Duo E6600 so my multiplier is 9 which gives you FSB x 9 = CPU speed or 350 x 9 = 3150Mhz which you will see below on the following screens.
Next up is the PCI-E Frequency which is your video card slot speed and below that is the PCI Clock Frequency for the rest of your boards expansion slots. I will not be explaining these in detail, there are dozens of threads in these forums dealing with both. Suffice it to say you want to lock them as I have to keep your motherboard slots/components from overclocking with the CPU and Memory.
We also see Memory voltage, CPU Core Voltage, FSB Termination Voltage, MCH and ICH chipset voltage (in the "old days" MCH and ICH where called Northbridge and Southbridge, generaly the Northbridge has a bigger heatsink on it). Memory and CPU voltages may or may not have to be raised depending on your components and what speeds your trying to achieve. Since my DDR2-800 ram is running at DDR2-875 I have found 2.05v to be a good spot for stability, I also locked in my CPU Core at 1.36v for the same reason. FSB and MCH have also been adjusted for the same reasons, primarily stability. The ICH or Southbridge does not generaly need additional voltage but I did do this guide showing why it may need to have thermal compound applied to keep things stable.
Next we have the Advanced CPU Settings page in the BIOS. This is where you will want to turn off a lot of the "power saving" features of the CPU because they have been known to interfere with overclocking results.
First you see the Modify Ratio setting, if your CPU allows you to adjust the multiplier you might find this setting useful in helping gain higher FSB speeds during your OCing attempts. Besides Microcode Updation I have shut everything else off on this page. Again if you want or need details on what these things do searching these Forums will most likely provide more data than you wanted.
Next up we have what I consider one of the more important areas of the BIOS to the overclocker, the Hardware Monitor settings page. I consider this important because you can set all of your fans to Performance Mode which will greatly improve your CPU and case cooling. As you can see I have everything but my Power Supply set to Performance. I recommend you do the same or get a fan bus so you can crank things up. Good case cooling is just as important as good CPU cooling.
Next up is the Advanced Chipset Settings page of the BIOS. Here you can turn off the SPD settings and program the BIOS to run specific timings for your memory. In this case you can see I chose the default timings for my Ram of 5-5-5-15 which is what Corsair rated my memory for at DDR2-800 speeds. If you remember I previously set my FSB bus to 350Mhz which gave me a memory divider option of DDR2-875Mhz or slower to run my Ram at, slower in this case was below the default speed of DDR2-800 so I chose to boost my voltage to run the higher memory speed.
You will also notice ECC mode (I don't know anyone running ECC Ram but someone might be
), Hyperpath 3, DRAM Throttling, and Memory Remap. I suggest shutting them all off since Hyperpath 3 seems to limit some folks OCing, DRAM Throttling is self explainitory and Memory Remap is not needed by Windows XP.
Last but not least are the PEG Link features. This is an ASUS overclock feature that would normaly provide some small boost to your video card on a stock clocked machine. Since we are overclocking and you have locked the PCI-E bus at 100 I would set these to Normal or Auto as shown and move on to more important things.
Here we are at the last page of the BIOS and these settings are really user whim more than anything else. Probably the most useful item here is the ability to turn off the ASUS Full Screen Logo at start up so you can watch the POST process when you start your machine.
Hopefully you will find some use for this admittedly brief and basic guide to tweaking the P5W DH Deluxe. This should help the beginners out there get thier feet wet without causing any damage to your machine. Remember to take things slow and easy and make good use of these Forums for advice if you get stuck. Happy OCing
A lot of new (to the P5W DH) people have been asking me about overclocking on the P5W DH Deluxe so I thought a quick start guide for these folks would be a good idea. This guide is not meant for the hardcore folks who have been around for a while and I claim no special knowledge of the P5W DH Deluxe, these are my own experiences in OCing with this board. Please note I am running the 1602 BIOS, you may have some slightly different options depending on your BIOS version!
The screen shots below will be familar once you go into your BIOS and start looking around at all of the options ASUS has given us to play with. The most important thing for people new to OCing to remember is do not change something in the BIOS without knowing what it does, you can get yourself into trouble quickly. That being said you also need to keep in mind that most of us learned by breaking stuff
We'll take the screen shots one at a time with a breakdown on the important stuff under each image.
First up is System Frequency and Voltage. Setting AI Overclocking to manual will allow you to change CPU Frequency and DRAM Frequency. As you can see my rig is running a 350 Mhz FSB which is yeilding a 875Mhz DDR2 Frequency. Keep in mind your dealing with DDR2 ram so applications like CPU-Z will show half of this speed or 438Mhz for the ram. We are also dealing with Intel's quad pumped FSB so expect to see 1400 Mhz for the FSB using CPU-Z. My chip is the C2Duo E6600 so my multiplier is 9 which gives you FSB x 9 = CPU speed or 350 x 9 = 3150Mhz which you will see below on the following screens.
Next up is the PCI-E Frequency which is your video card slot speed and below that is the PCI Clock Frequency for the rest of your boards expansion slots. I will not be explaining these in detail, there are dozens of threads in these forums dealing with both. Suffice it to say you want to lock them as I have to keep your motherboard slots/components from overclocking with the CPU and Memory.
We also see Memory voltage, CPU Core Voltage, FSB Termination Voltage, MCH and ICH chipset voltage (in the "old days" MCH and ICH where called Northbridge and Southbridge, generaly the Northbridge has a bigger heatsink on it). Memory and CPU voltages may or may not have to be raised depending on your components and what speeds your trying to achieve. Since my DDR2-800 ram is running at DDR2-875 I have found 2.05v to be a good spot for stability, I also locked in my CPU Core at 1.36v for the same reason. FSB and MCH have also been adjusted for the same reasons, primarily stability. The ICH or Southbridge does not generaly need additional voltage but I did do this guide showing why it may need to have thermal compound applied to keep things stable.
Next we have the Advanced CPU Settings page in the BIOS. This is where you will want to turn off a lot of the "power saving" features of the CPU because they have been known to interfere with overclocking results.
First you see the Modify Ratio setting, if your CPU allows you to adjust the multiplier you might find this setting useful in helping gain higher FSB speeds during your OCing attempts. Besides Microcode Updation I have shut everything else off on this page. Again if you want or need details on what these things do searching these Forums will most likely provide more data than you wanted.
Next up we have what I consider one of the more important areas of the BIOS to the overclocker, the Hardware Monitor settings page. I consider this important because you can set all of your fans to Performance Mode which will greatly improve your CPU and case cooling. As you can see I have everything but my Power Supply set to Performance. I recommend you do the same or get a fan bus so you can crank things up. Good case cooling is just as important as good CPU cooling.
Next up is the Advanced Chipset Settings page of the BIOS. Here you can turn off the SPD settings and program the BIOS to run specific timings for your memory. In this case you can see I chose the default timings for my Ram of 5-5-5-15 which is what Corsair rated my memory for at DDR2-800 speeds. If you remember I previously set my FSB bus to 350Mhz which gave me a memory divider option of DDR2-875Mhz or slower to run my Ram at, slower in this case was below the default speed of DDR2-800 so I chose to boost my voltage to run the higher memory speed.
You will also notice ECC mode (I don't know anyone running ECC Ram but someone might be
), Hyperpath 3, DRAM Throttling, and Memory Remap. I suggest shutting them all off since Hyperpath 3 seems to limit some folks OCing, DRAM Throttling is self explainitory and Memory Remap is not needed by Windows XP.Last but not least are the PEG Link features. This is an ASUS overclock feature that would normaly provide some small boost to your video card on a stock clocked machine. Since we are overclocking and you have locked the PCI-E bus at 100 I would set these to Normal or Auto as shown and move on to more important things.
Here we are at the last page of the BIOS and these settings are really user whim more than anything else. Probably the most useful item here is the ability to turn off the ASUS Full Screen Logo at start up so you can watch the POST process when you start your machine.
Hopefully you will find some use for this admittedly brief and basic guide to tweaking the P5W DH Deluxe. This should help the beginners out there get thier feet wet without causing any damage to your machine. Remember to take things slow and easy and make good use of these Forums for advice if you get stuck. Happy OCing
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Figured I'd share what I figured out through trial and error.
