BIOS Features (cont’d)
More minor voltage adjustment can be applied on settings like the CPU differential amplitude.
For the really hardcore overclockers that want even more minute control of the clock rate of the processor you can adjust the clock skew rate.
This menu shows all the available processor functions that can be adjusted on the motherboard including another place to change the CPU ratio and all the various power functions, virtualization, etc. What is more interesting is seeing features like the ability to turn off the hardware prefetcher, disable adjacent cache line prefetch, individual cores, etc.
If you want to try some Core i7 dual-core testing you can do so by just enabling a single or pair of cores here.
The hardware monitor in the BIOS allows you to keep an eye on the CPU and MB temperatures, the CPU and chassis fan speeds and various voltages as well.
Again one of my favorite features that I wish more manufacturers would adopt is to include the BIOS flashing application directly into the BIOS itself – it makes updating the system with a USB flash stick MUCH easier than using a floppy drive or needing to make some kind of boot CD just for the purpose.
The ASUS P6T Deluxe offers up support for profiles as well so you can save settings once you have them stable and revert back to them if you need to for any reason.
Going back to our first screenshots of the BIOS, when you picked between Auto, manual, XMP and DOCP overclocking options, we can test out the others. If you set the Ai Overclock Tuner to XMP, which is only available if you have XMP-ready memory modules that included additional settings on them, you will see various settings have been changed. For these Corsair modules used in testing, we can see that they upped the memory multiplier to allow for DDR3-1600 MHz speeds, increased the QPI/DRAM voltage to 1.35v and…
… increased the DRAM bus voltage to 1.66v.
The DOCP option is designed for the highest possible DRAM frequency rather than higher clock rates and it actually changed more options like lowering the CPU ratio from 24x to 22x and then increasing the host clock to 150 MHz over the 133 MHz base…
… and pushed the DRAM voltage all the way up to 2.0v! I should note however that I never was able to POST the system with these settings configured. That is a bit disconcerting considering they are integrated options in the BIOS that a user could very easily access but that is part of the chance you take with any kind of overclocking.
Overall the BIOS of the ASUS P6T Deluxe is just as competant at overclocking as the Intel DX58SO ‘Smackover’ motherboard even if it is a bit more complex and difficult to navigate around.
Overall the BIOS of the ASUS P6T Deluxe is just as competant at overclocking as the Intel DX58SO ‘Smackover’ motherboard even if it is a bit more complex and difficult to navigate around.
