Asus P5WDG2-WS and P5WD2-E Premium - 975X Motherboard Showcase
P5WDG2-WS: BIOS & Overclocking
The Asus P5WDG2-WS 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.
|
|
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
The standard BIOS menu screens don't reveal anything extraordinary, and will likely look familiar to anyone who has worked with an Asus motherboard in the past. They will, however, give you a "feel" for the layout and organization of the options. Each individual screen has a host of menus that tunnel deeper and deeper as the options get more complex. Overall, it is very similar to the Award BIOS derivatives used on most other motherboards, but navigating through Asus' BIOS does take some getting used to if you've never experienced it before.
We should also note that the P5WDG2-WS' BIOS incorporates an Asus proprietary feature dubbed HyperPath 3 that's designed to further reduce memory access latency, over and above what's typically offered with the 975X Express chipset. Here's what Asus has to saw about HyperPath 3:
|
Hyper Path 3 Data transfers within the system are made possible by various mechanisms that synchronize the sending and receiving of commends among components. Unfortunately, these mechanisms cause data transfer delays known as latency time. This unique feature significantly shortens latency time during data transfers, allowing users to experience the real power of their computers. |
|
|
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
Although the P5WDG2-WS is targeted at workstation users, Asus still saw fit to incorporate a host of overclocking tools into its system BIOS. With the P5WDG2-WS, 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.
The board also allows users to tweak memory, processor core, FSB, Northbridge and Southbridge voltages. The memory voltage can be set as high as 2.3v, 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.
Armed with a Pentium Extreme Edition 955 processor, we set out to see how high we could overclock our CPU by altering the multiplier, voltages and the FSB. We bumped our memory voltage to 2.2v and increased the processor core voltage by .1v. Then we jacked up the FSB until the test system was no longer stable. When all was said and done, we were able to take our CPU to 4.26GHz, by upping the multiplier to 15 and raising the FSB to 285MHz. If we dropped the multiplier down to 14, however, we hit a peak FSB of about 302MHz. We could boot into Windows with higher FSB frequencies, but our test system wasn't completely stable once we got past 302MHz.
