Overclocking Results
The new LGA 1156 socket from Intel brought with it a host of new features to separate it from the older LGA 1366 offerings. Ryan covered these new overclocking features extensively in three separate articles on the i7-870, i5-750, and i7-860 so I won’t go into too much depth into those differences. Suffice to say, the LGA 1156 processors have been exceptional for overclocking, and the price point of these CPUs are pretty decent as well.
ASUS TurboV in manual mode
One unique overclocking utility ASUS bundled with the P7P55D Deluxe is a program called TurboV. TurboV, in tandem with Turbo Key, are two tools that allow users to do basic overclocking from the their desktop. TurboV allows users to overclock the BCLK frequency, CPU voltage, IMC voltage, and DRAM bus voltage and these changes take effect in real-time without rebooting the system. We attempted to use TurboV to see how it would overclock our LGA 1156 system, but unfortunately we ran into a few stability issues while the program was fine tuning our BIOS settings in real-time. These programs have also had a few bugs, but overall the program’s interface was nice and informative, but the auto tuning feature left a lot to be desired.
When I started overclocking our i7-860 LGA 1156 processor manually, I went through a few basic steps for setting up my test system’s BIOS settings. Here’s a quick run-down of a few settings I altered before I started to overclock the P7P55D Deluxe:
– Disable Intel EIST (SpeedStep)
– Disable C1E Support (power-saving feature)
– Adjust memory ratio to 4 (1066MHz), but leave DRAM Timing Mode at Auto
– Change DMI ratio to lowest available setting, which is 16 (4266MHz)
– Disable Load-Line Calibration
– Disable Spread spectrum
After those initial steps were completed, I dropped the CPU multiplier to 20x and starting increasing the base clock until I noticed stability issues. Stability issues started to appear at around 178MHz so I started to add a little more voltage to the CPU. After increasing the CPU voltage to about 1.3v, I was able to increase the base clock to 193MHz before I hit a stable frequency at around 189MHz. The board wouldn’t let me go past 190MHz because of memory timing and frequency issues so I tried to adjust them to squeeze out a little more power from my i7-860. Unfortunately, our RAM wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to so we had to stick with an overclock of 3.773GHz, which isn’t too bad considering the ambient temps in the room were between 79f and 85f.
This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 3.773GHz overclock on the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe.
Here’s a screenshot of our BIOS settings we used when we overclocked the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe.
| CPU Speed | BCLK | CPU Multiplier | DMI | DRAM Frequency | DRAM Timings | CPU Voltage | Temp (Idle) | Temp (Load) |
| 3.773GHz | 189 MHz | 20x
|
3018.5 MHz | 1132 MHz | 8-8-8-20 1T | 1.31v | 33c, 32c, 37c, 34c
|
58c, 57c, 60c, 62c
|
Overclocking Results
The ASUS P7P55D Deluxe held true to the ASUS brand and gave us a respectable overclock that could have gone much higher with higher rated memory. I think some of the auto memory settings in the BIOS were tightening the timings a bit too much for how high were were trying to overclock our i7-860. The tighter timings and lower DRAM frequencies weren’t stable for long during our stability testing either. But, the board itself was rock solid and is definitely a stellar overclocker in the high-end LGA 1156 motherboard category.
