Physically installing the motherboard goes without fanfare. This is, in fact, a standard ATX motherboard with a few exceptions. The first and foremost, is the EATX Power connector, yes, that is a 24 pin design Dorothy, and unless your 20 Pin ATX 2.02 compliant PSU can supply 15A on the +12V rail, you will need a new PSU to power this baby up. You can see 6 memory slots next to the Power and looking closely, we can see the 2 yellow rows have a separator pin that is slightly offset to the other 2 matched pairs. This is for DDR2, the other 4 support standard DDR memory. Of course the other sore thumb begging to be noticed is the PCIe bus, the x16 slot is noticeably different then AGP, as are the x1 slots.
Typical of ASUS, the headers are labeled well to the point that I barely had to reference the manual to figure out what plugged in where. The PCIe video seems to be a better design then the previous AGP solution. The card fits snugly and feels as though it won't move, which of course the retention mechanism assists with.
The SATA connectors are all placed near the rear edge of the board keeping those cables away from the rest of the components. Note also that the IDE connectors are kept to the rear edge, although with one hanging off the back of the board, it is curious that all of them are not in that position.
My first install attempt was Yoper, a newer Linux distribution using the Knoppix Discovery engine, one of the best out there in this users opinion. Even with this, Yoper was unable to discover my NIC, Northbridge and Video card (surprise surprise). I understand that there are fixes in place now where you can “add on” the drivers for PCIe within the Linux kernel. I had neither the time nor fortitude to do so for this review, hopefully I will be able to soon however, as Yoper has been a promising distribution.
Next I installed Windows XP, the install went smoothly and as expected, XP did not recognize the NIC, Video or Northbridge. I popped in the ASUS utility CD and proceeded to install the drivers. 4 reboots later I had everything recognized and ready to roll. The ASUS utility CD is fine for what it is, but I would like to see more of a Foxconn type solution in respect to the ability to install all of the drivers with one click and one reboot. Included on the utility CD is the ASUS Probe, BIOS Update Utility and AI NOS software.
BIOS
The BIOS is probably one of the top 10 reasons someone would build their own PC instead of buying it off of an assembly line. The assembly line PC’s are fixed; you get what you get with minimal ability to modify performance. ASUS uses the AMI BIOS, which has been their staple since the early days.
The AMI BIOS is where many of the user level tweaks can be done in order to improve performance or stability. Our board uses the 1002 Rev004 version of the BIOS, which is the current available BIOS at time of writing. In fact, the ASUS update utility failed to even find a version of BIOS for this motherboard, much less a newer one.
Under Configure System Frequency/Voltage, there are a number of options available. On the AI Overclocking tab, your choices are Manual, Auto, Standard, Overclocking Profile, and AI Non-delay Overclocking System (N.O.S.). While the others are fairly self-explanatory, AI N.O.S. is unique in that depending on your system load, the motherboard will dynamically overclock. During this time, the FSB and voltages will be adjusted automatically.
Setting the AI Overclocking tab to Manual will open up options most enthusiasts are accustomed to. CPU Frequency options range from 100-400MHz in 1MHz increments, which you can manually key in.
For memory, you have the options to run synchronous 400MHz (1:1), or async at 533MHz (4:3), and 600MHz (3:2). You can also adjust your memory timings manually, and as usual, lower numbers will improve performance at the expense of stability. Hyper Path 2 controls the latency timings between the CPU and memory, and enabling it will result in improved system performance.
For your voltage options, you have the default 1.525v for the CPU, and it can scale as high as 1.7v in 0.0125v increments. For the memory, it starts at 1.8v and tops off at 2.1v. The chipset's options are 1.5v and 1.6v.
There are more BIOS options that we won't go into here but suffice to say ASUS has given the end user enough rope within the BIOS to literally hang themselves, so you need to be very careful in what you enable and disable throughout the P5GDC Deluxe.
Overclocking
The ASUS P5GDC Deluxe is probably the easiest motherboard I have attempted overclocking with to date. Built into the BIOS is the ability to use preset values for overclocking at a given percentage. This goes from 5% all of the way to 25%. When selected, the BIOS inserts the appropriate values automatically for you. There is also a section to allow for FSB tuning; however I did not have much luck with this scenario. Turning to the manual model I was able to OC all of the way to 257 FSB without changing a thing, no VCore adjustments, no VDDR2 adjustments and not even an upgrade on the stock Intel HS/Fan. Impressive.
Unfortunately all attempts beyond 257 FSB was thwarted by the SATA / IDE bus, as I continually got the “Invalid Boot Disk, Please replace with a valid boot disk and press enter to continue” error. This was no matter which SATA or IDE connector I used.
I am hoping this is simply an issue with the relatively immaturity of the chipset drivers, and something we can look forward to overcoming in the near future.
A note here; these overclocks were achieved using DDR2 memory, using DDR memory I was unable to achieve an FSB greater than 215MHz (obviously not an issue with the CPU or Drives at that point). I am thinking that this again is an issue with immature drivers as it relates to the communication between DDR and the new LGA775.
Once in Windows (yes, win32 only, no Linux support here), you have the ability with the ASUS Utility to OC using the N.O.S. I attempted several variations and settings to no avail with this program which continually locked the machine once applying the NOS settings.
NEXT
