Asus P5W DH Deluxe, 975X Core 2 Duo Ready Motherboard
BIOS and Overclocking
The Asus P5WDG2-WS DH Deluxe is equipped with an AMI (American Megatrends, Inc.) BIOS, that is relatively complete and fairly easy to navigate. From within the BIOS, users have the ability to configure, enable or disable all of the board's various integrated peripherals, and can monitor fan speeds, voltages and clock speeds.
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The board also allows users to tweak memory, processor core, FSB, Northbridge and Southbridge voltages. The memory voltage can be set as high as 2.4v, the Vcore as high as 1.7v, FSB as high as 1.5, and the Northbridge and Southbridge voltages can be set as high as 1.65v and 1.2v, respectively. Since the P5W DH Deluxe is targeted at enthusiasts and power users, Asus incorporated a host of overclocking tools into its system BIOS as well. With the P5W DH Deluxe, users have the ability to alter their processor's front side bus frequency in 1MHz increments, between 100MHz and 450MHz. And they can also set the memory to run at an assortment of frequencies, including 1066MHz when using a processor with a similar FSB. PCI Express and PCI clocks can also be altered, or locked in to their default values.
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Armed with a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor, we set out to see how high we could overclock our CPU by altering the voltages and the FSB. We bumped our memory voltage to 2.3v and increased the processor core voltage by .1v. Then we jacked up the FSB as far as we could, keeping memory speeds within reasonable limits, via the board's multitude of clock divisors.
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When all was said and done, we were able to take our E6700 CPU to 3.5GHz, by raising its FSB to 350MHz and running our RAM at DDR2-1050MHz settings in the BIOS. This overclock was achieved with the help of one of our favorite standard LGA775 type HSF coolers from Arctic Cooling, the AC Freezer 7.
