Asus A8N-SLI OC'ing

[NateSolberg]

Hey everyone First time Poster, Long time Reader
(that's an FTP, LTR)

I recently built up a system with the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and was immediately perplexed by the BIOS. I've been building machines professionally for about 3 years now, and have never seen anything quite like the overclocking options on this board. Here's what's up:

I'm not entirely sure on the exact names since the machine isn't infront of me, but there's a section about CPU Properties where you go in one more level and see DRAM Configuration. There you can set the timings and whatnot, but there's a wierd thing called "DDR Frequency Limit" or something to that effect. It places your "fsb" at more-or-less half of the limit and automatically switches the "Jumperfree Configuration" to Auto. If you go back to the "Jumperfree Configuration" and change it from Auto to Manual (so as to set some voltages), the ratio for the RAM gets cut back. For those who are confused, here's a rundown:

1. Set DDR limit to DDR-500 and timings to manual settings
2. Go into Jumperfree and change from Auto to Manual to set voltages and leave "FSB" at 250
3. Reboot and the RAM is picked up as DDR-200 all of a sudden.

1. Set DDR limit to DDR-500 and reboot
2. System errors because of insufficent voltage to memory or cpu?

As far as Overclocking with nTune, I was able to get about a 450mhz DDR speed, but 500 was unstable because of timings or just the fact that I was already in Windows (never had much luck with that). Not to mention, the PCI-EX bus is only locked if you overclock in the BIOS. Otherwise it runs with the "FSB" according to nTune.

I was using a 90nm Athlon 64 3200, Mushkin Level II 2-2-2 (1gb Dual Kit), with Two PCI-EX 6800's (not ultra or gt) and a 200gb W/D SATA hard drive. Thermaltake Purepower 480watt with Active PFC was running the whole rig.

Anyone had an experience with a wiggy OC'ing BIOS like this? My NF7-S and numerous MSI boards have never had anything like this in them. I've read numerous reviews showing the board at DDR-600+ so I'm pretty sure it's not the board. The RAM ofcourse should be able to hit DDR-500 atleast, and the multplier on the CPU was dropped to make sure it wasn't hitting it's top.

 

[pnyxxpress]

Nate you posted on the thread I started in cpu. Have you grabbed the latest bios update from asus? It's still in beta. It changed the whole prospective on what I was experiencing prior to upgrading.

Mike

 

[GuitarDaddy]

I have been using this board for about a month now. And it overclocks very well once you get past the "Totally mislabled ram settings"

1. Ingnore the bios descriptions of what these settings do, they are just wrong. These settings do not limit your maximum DDR speed.

Here is what they really do

AUTO: Automatically applies increasingly smaller memory dividers as you raise HTT past 217, always keeping ram less than 200mhz

DDR400: This setting runs ram 1:1 with HTT, ram speed increases with HTT
DDR333: fixed 5/6 mem divider, same as the 166 setting on older mobos
DDR266: fixed 2/3 mem divider, ie.. 133

I don't know what Asus was thinking on the higher settings, to me they are totally worthless.
I have only tested the DDR466 and DDR500 settings.


DDR500: This setting attempts to boot your machine with HTT at 250, and all other settings set to default, including the max cpu-multi and stock voltages. My A64 3200 won't boot at these settings, and I doubt many people can boot to a 25% cpu overclock with stock voltage.

DDR466: This setting works just like the DDR500 setting except it boots at HTT 233(17% O/C)with stock voltages. My machine will boot at this setting. Once you boot it acts just like the DDR400 setting, and keeps ram 1:1


I will also mention that it has been found that this board won't seem to run ram stable over 240mhz at 1T command rate, so if you want to run ram over 240 you will have to use 2T