NVIDIA Performance Control Panel
The Performance section of the new NVIDIA control panel is what allows the users to modify any objects or settings that ESA has control over as well as doing some overclocking.
The first screen here shows the CPU section of the performance settings. Here you can adjust the front-side bus and CPU core voltages.
All of these settings are adjustable without a reboot and by using simple slider and drop down boxes the changes are pretty easy. Again though, I do wish there was some context for the end user as to what might NOT be safe for a voltage.
You might be curious what that “device rules” section is in the CPU window shown; well here is the answer. This allows you to setup a custom relationship between two factors that the CPU window controls using a modifiable line graph. Above you can see me creating a rule called “ULTIMATE” that will control the CPU frequency based on the CPU temperature. The line on the graph can be dragged and changed, with new inflection points even, to create this new relationship. In this example, as the CPU temperature increases up to 50C or so, the processor will overclock slightly: 102% of standard rates. As the temperature increases, the frequency falls, thus hopefully keeping us from killing the CPU.
I did have some complaints with this part of control panel including that if you use punctuation in the name, the rule just clears and doesn’t save without giving you a warning about a bad naming scheme. Also, being able to push the CPU t 102.5% isn’t really that impressive and I would have liked to see more range on this.
Once the rule has been created, it is saved under the CPU section and you can continue to create your profile, an overall scheme that affects all the components listed here.
The motherboard section of the Performance control panel has a lot more options for you play around with, as you might expect. Here you can also adjust the FSB but the list of options goes on: PCIe bus speed, chipset voltages, FSB voltages, chipset fan speeds and more. You can also create new rules for this section as well and choose which components are changed based on others as the input source.
The memory section allows the user to change a lot of timings without need to reboot but the memory ratio and CAS latency can only be adjusted in the BIOS access section of the control panel and then applied with a reboot.
The memory voltage is adjustable though and can be pushed all the way up to 2.5v in this menu!
