The BIOS
The American Megatrends (AMI) BIOS makes another appearance on the ASUS platform.
Under CPU Configuration, you can change settings for HyperTransport, and the memory configuration. For HyperTransport, this controls the speed of the link between the CPU and your system. The faster the link (maximum 800MHz), the better the performance. HT DATA Width (Upstream) and HT DATA Width (Downstream) can be configured as 8 or 16-bit, but you should leave it at the latter for maximum performance.
Under Memory Configuration, you can tweak your ram settings to get the most out of your setup. You can adjust your memory speed, CAS Latency, and your memory timing options (lower timings are faster, but may be less stable).
Under the CPU FSB Frequency, you can adjust the FSB of the CPU for overclocking. It starts at 200FSB, and goes as high as 300FSB, but since there are no multiplier adjustments, it's going to be tough getting anything stable once you pass 205FSB (as we've experienced). There is a Performance Mode setting where you can reduce the latency and while setting it at Turbo will net the best performance, it'l also be less stable if you don't use high quality ram.
For CPU voltage changes, you need to adjust the VCORE Offset, from as little as 100mV to as much as 300mV. Without any multiplier adjustments, you'll need the extra voltage more tha ever for overclocking. The DDR Voltage tops out at 2.8v, which is fine for most users, since a 250FSB OC is likely very difficult (most DDR500 modules need 2.9v). The AGP voltage can go as high as 1.7v and the V-Link up to 2.7v.
Overclocking
There will be a few obstacles when trying to overclock the current crop of Athlon 64 CPUs. Our A64 3200+ was multiplier locked, and chances are, yours will be to. The most recent ASUS K8V BIOS does not allow for multiplier unlocking, so you'll be limited to increasing the FSB. At a recent meeting with Keith at VIA, he informed me that the AGP bus will increase as you bump the FSB up, so depending on how sensitive your video card is, high OCs will be very difficult.
At 2.5-3-3-6 memory times, the maximum OC the motherboard handled was 227FSB, but we experienced random lockups and crashes. This was also after increasing voltage to 300mV. It was at this point that a re-image was required as I lost all USB control.At memory timings of 3-4-4-7, and we managed an overclock of 226FSB, but again, the system was unreliable, though no reformat was needed.
In order to maintain stability, we settled for an OC of 215FSB, with memory timings of 3-4-4-7. Though application benchmarking was stable, the system still randomly crashed at running game benchmarks. I did improve things somewhat by playing with the memory and AGP voltages, but there was still some odd behaviour (lockups mostly) at these speeds. At 208FSB, we finally reached stability, even with the ram now running at 2.5-3-3-6.
I did have a second A64 3200+, but unfortunently, I had even less luck with that processor... maxing out at 205FSB.
Test Setup
ASUS K8V Deluxe: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.49, ATI Catalyst 3.8
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.49, ATI Catalyst 3.8
Test software will be:
Unreal Tournament 2003
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Though most benchmarks should be self explanitory, VirtualDub and TMPGEnc may raise a few eyebrows. We've elected to use these apps as real-world tests, and wrote this small article to explain our testing methodology.
The comparison platform will be the MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R, which is also an A64 motherboard using the K8T800 chipset. The Kingston modules will be run at 2.5-3-3-6.
All our benchmarks were run on a 32-bit version of Windows XP. The 64-bit Windows isn't due for a few months, and according to AMD, we may get a significant performance boost in a true 64-bit environment. In anycase, the Athlon 64 (A64) runs 32-bit code natively with no emulation.
SiSoft Sandra 2004
Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version. We do have a 64-bit copy, but unfortunently it won't work on our current version of Windows.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
Memory Benchmark
It's a close call between the two K8T800 boards, but overall, the ASUS was a bit speedier than MSI across all the SiSoft benchmarks. Despite being a single channel solution, the K8T800's memory scores are very impressive, besting nVidia's nForce 2 scores, though if you refer to our Canterwood reviews, Intel's boards still rule the roost.
