BIOS & Overclocking

When it comes to overclocking, we'd say that Asus delivers 9 out of 10 times. We really take had a neat rails record with their boards in the final few years and we take tested no less than a couple dozen in that timeframe.

A few weeks agone we showed you the new LGA1156 processors for the first fourth dimension: the Core i7 870, 860, and Cadre i5 750. We only had time to overclock the Core i5 750 at the fourth dimension and managed to get a stable 4.13GHz frequency using the P7P55D Deluxe with an early BIOS version. Now using an updated BIOS revision we've been able to ameliorate upon this impressive number with a stable overclock of 4.20GHz.

In order to achieve this we paid a visit to the "Ai Tweaker" carte in the Asus P7P55D Deluxe BIOS. Here nosotros ready the Ai Overclock Tuner setting to manual, increased the CPU ratio setting to x21, and set the base of operations clock frequency to 200MHz. This boosted the DDR3 frequency to 1600MHz.

We were able to crack the 4GHz barrier using only the Prolimatech Megahalems air-cooler. The voltage was raised but the P7P55D Deluxe did this automatically without our influence. At its default operating frequency of 2.66GHz, the Core i5 750 sucked down around 1.250v, while at 4.20GHz information technology required 1.550v.

This begs the question equally to why the automatic overclocking office in the BIOS was then useless. When setting the "OC Tuner" to good performance the motherboard overclocked our Core i5 750 processor to 3.25GHz using a 155MHz base clock. And so when irresolute the OC Tuner setting to ameliorate operation the base of operations clock was increased to 175MHz, giving us a clock speed of 3.67GHz.

Although these overclocks were stable, it took the Asus P7P55D Deluxe more than 5 minutes of screen flickering to reach them. In comparison, the machine overclocking characteristic of the MSI P55-GD65 takes just seconds to become the same result. Then while this feature worked 'fine', it certainly needs some refinement.