Overclocking Results
Overclocking with the ASUS P6T Deluxe was a fairly pleasant experience considering this was only our second X58 motherboard we have gotten our hands on and only our second chance at overclocking a completely new CPU architecture. I already went over the first complexity with the use of physical jumpers on the motherboard to access higher than normal voltage settings on the board, but getting past that the system is pretty similar to what we saw on Intel’s motherboard last week.The highest multiplier we were able to reach on the Intel DX58SO motherboard with our Core i7-965 EE processor, even with voltage adjustment, was 30x. With the ASUS P6T Deluxe I was able to take it one step further:
Our Core i7-965 EE processor running with a 31x multiplier
With a 31x multiplier the CPU is running at 4142 MHz – a big increase over the stock clock speed of 3.20 GHz and we did it without any voltage adjustments.
An interesting issue I saw creep up on the ASUS board was that when you adjusted the multiplier at all, up or down, the ability for the CPU to run with the various power state features was gone. In other words, the CPU ran at this 4.14 GHz clock speed the entire time and never clocked down to save power. This is a bit of a letdown though since we were able to do just that with the Intel-built motherboard giving us the ability to run at lower power (and thus lower heat) when idle and use the Turbo Mode / SpeedStep technology to increase the clock rate when necessary.
It is entirely possible that ASUS will enable this ability with a future BIOS release – we should note that ASUS is the first out of the gate with a retail X58 motherboard and as such are likely going through as much of a learning process as we are with the new processor.
Testing out the memory overclocking ability of the P6T Deluxe, we threw in the Corsair 6GB three channel memory kit and pumped up the DDR3 speed to 1600 MHz:
An interesting issue I saw creep up on the ASUS board was that when you adjusted the multiplier at all, up or down, the ability for the CPU to run with the various power state features was gone. In other words, the CPU ran at this 4.14 GHz clock speed the entire time and never clocked down to save power. This is a bit of a letdown though since we were able to do just that with the Intel-built motherboard giving us the ability to run at lower power (and thus lower heat) when idle and use the Turbo Mode / SpeedStep technology to increase the clock rate when necessary.
It is entirely possible that ASUS will enable this ability with a future BIOS release – we should note that ASUS is the first out of the gate with a retail X58 motherboard and as such are likely going through as much of a learning process as we are with the new processor.
Testing out the memory overclocking ability of the P6T Deluxe, we threw in the Corsair 6GB three channel memory kit and pumped up the DDR3 speed to 1600 MHz:
At 1600 MHz, the system memory is running significantly faster than the 1066 MHz that Intel officially supports on the CPUs.
After the memory overclock, we retested the synthetic memory speeds in SiSoft Sandra and got an impressive jump from about 22.9 GB/s to the 27.1 GB/s you see here.
