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:
- 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.
– 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.
- A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is 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.
- 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.
- We used an Animatrix file, titled , 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.
– 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.
– 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 and the on-board NIC(s) using .
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