Asus A8N SLI Deluxe still sucks at FSB oc?

[UzairH]

Reading Anand's recent review, as well as all the posts in the official thread for this board, it appears that the maximum stable FSB this board reaches is 240MHz. Is that still the case today? I am gonna get primarily for overclocking so if it still suxors that would be no go.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Thats not quite right. The 240 limit is ram at a 1T command rate, you can run FSB/HTT quite high on this board you just have to use a memory divider or set a 2T command rate(divider is better, as 2T is a performance killer). On my board I can run at HTT 325mhz, my everyday settings that I've been using for 3 months are 289mhz x 9 = 2602mhz with ram at 236mhz (DDR472)

This isn't much of a limitation at all, as its widely reported that running high ram speed at 1:1 provides little benefit on A64's, all the best overclockers use mem dividers when overclocking A64's, check out the sig's of all the leaders in the benchmarking contest threads around here.

Anandtechs review was done with ram 1:1 which is just stupid, just shows how noobish they are when it comes to overclocking. And all their O/C testing was done with a 4000+?
So far I haven't seen any decent overclocking reviews done on NF4 boards

 

[UzairH]

Thanks a million GuitarDaddy Obvoiously I am new here, but from what I read in the A8N SLI forum a lot of people are having problems like issues with maxtor disks, RAID, and others. Are the newer revisions more problem-free? And also what you said about the OC limit, is it almost gaurenteed for my potential A8N to hit 290 or at least 270 HTT? Or does a significant percentage of the mobos fail to reach that freq?

Also would Kingston Value Ram CL3 be good for overclocking this board and Winchester 1.8GHz to say 2.5GHz or 277 HTT? Believe it or not that is the ONLY DDR1 ram available here in Pakistan I could set the mem divider to 150 to get the RAM at DDR 417. Would that work well?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Yes, originally there where quite a few issues with this board. But I think all the major ones have been worked out.

I think the Maxtor NCQ drives problem was fixed by a firmware update from Maxtor, but I'm not sure as I never had one of these drives.

The problems with recognizing Raid arrays was fixed with the latest nVidia standalone drivers.

And it appears most everyone can get high HTT on this board as long as you use a good power supply with 480-600watts. The few people I have seen that can't get a high HTT are using too small of a power supply.

Your ram should be okay as long as you use a divider to keep it close to 200mhz or under(DDR400). The dividers on this board are listed as max memory clock and are as follows

DDR400 = 200 setting on most boards = 1:1
DDR333 = 166 on most boards
DDR266 = 133 on most boards
DDR200 = 100 on most boards

These are the settings ASUS offers in the bios, you can use the in-between (missing) dividers (183,150,etc..)by using A64 tweaker (a free downloadable program)

 

[UzairH]

Thanks a bunch again GuitarDaddy! So I can set the mem dividers myself now? From the official thread I got the impression that people were having trouble with this and the board sets the divider automatically no matter what you do. It keeps the mem speed below 217. has that changed, and we can mess around as we want with mem divider?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Yes the mem dividers can be set manually, originally alot of people where very confused by the way ASUS labeled the dividers as "Max memory clock", but they have been there since day 1. Only if you use the AUTO "Max memory clock" setting will it set them automatically keeping ram under 217.

95% of the early problems with this board can be attributed to user error or lack of knowledge about the new NF4 boards. The Asus was the first to hit the market and has out sold all the other NF4 boards combined by a large margin, this explains the number of problem posts early on. Every teenage computer geek wannabe had to have one

IMO the Asus is the best, most stable and mature of all the NF4 boards. I love mine, and have been running a 600mhz overclock since I built it in December. The only advice I would have about buying this or any other NF4 board, don't use cheap components! Especially important on NF4 is power supply, all of these boards seem to require high quality PS with very little voltage fluctuations.

It sounds like your sources for computer parts are pretty limited in Pakistan. Can you order online from the UK or other EU countries?