Asus
uses the AMI BIOS and they have been typically heavy on the Overclocking
options, granted not to the level of a DFI.
Your
intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar
with, nothing out of the ordinary here. Let's look into a couple
of menus to see if we can find anything of interest shall we.
The
Advanced Menu is where we start to have some fun; lets jump
right into JumperFree. As you can see this is where we manipulate
the CPU and DRAM frequencies. We also have control of the PCIe
and PCI bus frequencies. Lower on the page is where we can set
the Voltages for things such as memory, CPU, MCH (North Bridge),
ICH (South Bridge) and Front Side Bus.
While
in the same Jumper Free section we can also set some automated
Overclocking. These two allow us to set an aggressive or conservative
overclock along with an automated, manual or AI NOS induced
overclock. AI NOS is kind of Intel SpeedStep in reverse, it
detects the load on the system and compensates by Overclocking
to fit the need.
While
Advanced CPU allows us very little in tweaking or even changing,
Advanced Chipset brings us the down and dirty for the memory
settings. Moving into the Audio subsection we see some new selections,
we can choose AC97, for Linux compliance I would imagine, and
HD for the windows drivers Asus includes. There is also the
ability to chose Vista HD over Non-Vista HD.
Asus
EZ backup is supposed to facilitate a way to back up your data
to a RAID, be it mirrored for safety, striped for speed or spanned
for greater storage. While Asus touts the “EZ”, it appears
to be anything but, I mean would you consider 12 pages of instructions
in the manual easy? In the LAN screen we can see how our Ethernet
cable is doing, is there a short? Was it built properly to begin
with? The Alarm section is, well, the ability to set an alarm
using your PC even when turned off; yeah, my $45 special (and
most of us don't even spend that much) can do a fine job thank
you, but it is there if you need it. Finally we have a setting
for Digital Home, which is an emphasis for Asus on the Deluxe
lineup. This assists in alleviating any noise the system makes
to maintain temperature by throttling down etc.
The
VCore is adjustable on the P5W DH and for the first time since
I have been reviewing the Conroes, it actually increases VCore
beyond 1.3V. I was able to get the VCore to 1.46V by selecting
1.5V in BIOS, anything beyond that was increasing the CPU temperature
to levels beyond what I felt was comfortable (I only have stock
cooling on this one).
To
round out the BIOS we see within the tools menu you can set
a music alarm by date and time, you are limited to music that
would play from your CD Drive. The interesting piece about this
is that it does work even if you have your machine powered off,
a tad bit of an expensive alarm clock, but meh... Under the
Power menu we are able to monitor things related to system power
and temperature. We can also set thresholds for thermal throttling
and the like.
Lastly
I will cover Asus EZ Flash 2, this is a first for me (as I have
not tested an Asus motherboard using EZ Flash as of yet) and
I must say it is a nice option for those who do not run windows.
Notice on the EZ Flash images that you are seeing several directories,
those are directories on my flash disk. Unfortunately it can
not read my hard drive as it is formatted NTFS, but this does
alleviate any need whatsoever for a floppy drive in my system,
no matter the OS. While Asus Update is not part of the BIOS,
it does affect it, therefore I included it in here.
Quick
Notes / Observations
Driver
Installation was fairly easy, Asus supplies you with a menu
that asks which drivers you would like installed and then proceeds
to inform you of how many reboots will be required to finish
the installation.
Asus
Update allows you to update the BIOS from within Windows (there
is no option available from Asus for Linux), a nice feature that
many of us have come accustomed to. Unfortunately, the BIOS is
the only thing that can be upgraded through this program (If you
remember, Foxconn allows for the upgrade of their drivers through
a similar program in their lineup).
Anybody
else see the little green sticker in the pictures when I went
over the IO section? It appears that the remote can ONLY be connected
to one of two USB ports, something well documented on the ports
themselves as well as in the manual. The remote is, well, a nice
gimmicky sort of device in this reviewers opinion. As much as
its a nice feature for a HTPC, this is way more motherboard then
I would design in place for that particular solution. I understand
Asus has geared the Deluxe in that direction but my thoughts tend
to lean more towards gaming performance then Home Theater entertainment.
Testing
Test
System: Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard, 2GB SuperTalent
PC2-6400, Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB,
8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2
Comparison
System: Foxconn 975X7AB Motherboard, 2GB SuperTalent
PC2-6400, Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB,
8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2.
Time
for the testing phase, all tests are run 3 times and results are
then averaged (unless otherwise noted). VL’s testing suite includes
the following:
SiSoft
Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite,
updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information,
it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.
3DMark06
– Another standard benchmark suite that you, the reader,
can easily download and compare to give you an idea of where your
system stands in relation to the solutions we are testing.
PiFast
- A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is
PiFast
version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000
digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.
Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
DVD
Shrink 3.2 - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus
feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the
hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is
better.
TMPGEnc
4.0 - We used an Animatrix file,
titled The
Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub.
The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file
with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower
is better.
HD
Tach – Similar to SiSoft in that it does not
necessarily give us real world indication of performance but does
allow for baseline testing and efficiency reports of CPU utilization
at maximum hard drive transfer rates.
Quake
4 – How good is the CPU / Video / Memory communication?
We strip down a demo of Q4 to 640x480 HQ and make the processor
do a lot more work then it normally has to.
Subsytem
Testing – We test the on-board sound performance
using RightMark3D
and the on-board NIC(s) using DUMeter.
NEXT
