The BIOS
The reference board makes use of the Pheonix Award BIOS, but expect motherboard manufacturers to implement their own (or the same) choices.
The Advanced Chipset features allow a great deal of customization and tweaking. In the DRAM Clock/Drive Control, you're given quite a bit of control of what you can do. Depending on the speed of your ram, you can adjust the DRAM Clock from 100MHz to 200MHz.
For your timings, you can either use the factory pre-sets, Turbo or Ultra, or set it to manual to adjust them yourself. I don't have much documentation on the DRAM Bus selection, but for maximum performance, you'll want to set it Dual Channel. What took some time to figure out though was where the ram needed to be seated. After a bit of moving around, the reference board required the ram to be in slot #1 and #4. You can expect retail boards to properly document this.
Under Frequency/Voltage Control, this is where you can play with the overclocking. The FSB range is 167 to 255. This range is a little conservative, but again, manufacturers will likely make some changes here.
The voltage options were fairly low, with the CPU vCore maxing out at 1.775v. This is somewhat average, but like many BIOS features, you can expect this to change. For DDR, you are allowed up to a maximum of 2.75v, and for the AGP, 1.65v.
Overclocking
Overclocking was no easy task. For the heck of it, the first OC we tried was 250FSB. This is a slam dunk with most Springdale and Canterwood motherboards, and something I knew for certain that our ram could do. Unfortunently, we were greeted with a blank screen. A CMOS reset fixed the problem, but no matter what voltages we adjusted, nothing could get us 250FSB. 240FSB was a no go, and it wasn't until we got to 235FSB, we were even able to POST.
We had various levels of success with 220FSB to 230FSB, sometimes getting into Windows, sometimes not. I was able to begin some benchmarking at 222FSB, but as soon as SiSoft started up, we had a system crash serious enough to force a reinstall of Windows.
In the end, I had to settle for a paltry 208FSB. At this time, I'm uncertain what the potential is for the PT880, as motherboard manufacturers will no doubt try some of their own tricks, so for now, let's just say that there is a lot of work that needs to be done in this area.
Test Setup
PT880 Reference: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Mushkin High Performance PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Maxtor SATA 150, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.49, ATI Catalyst 3.9
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Mushkin High Performance PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Maxtor SATA 150, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 3.9
Test software will be:
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
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 ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, in order to compare Intel's flagship DDR platform against VIA's. The Kingston modules will be run at 2.5-3-3-6.
