BIOS and Overclocking

ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard was tested with the latest BIOS available at the time of the test session: version 1004.

The BIOS of ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard is based on “ASUS?revision?of Award-Phoenix microcode. Therefore, the BIOS Setup of this mainboard is very similar to BIOS Setup of other current ASUS products, but at the same time is dramatically different from the BIOS Setup of competitor mainboards.

That is why, it is not at all surprising that the BIOS Setup of ASUS A8V-E Deluxe boasts a lot of interesting features, such as numerous options for automatic overclocking in the first place. At the same time, however, we have to state that it is not free from quite a few frustrating bugs, which cause problems during mainboard operation. We have already mentioned one of them, the inability of USB ports to work correctly in USB 2.0 mode. The other issues we need to point out will be discussed in this review section.

However, let’s stick to our traditional plan and begin with the manual options an overclocker gets with the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe. Among them are:

• The frequency of the clock generator can be adjusted from 200 to 400MHz with 1MHz increment.
• The frequency of the PCI Express bus can be independently adjusted from 100 to 200MHz with 1MHz increment;
• The PCI bus frequency can be manually set to 33, 37.5 or 40MHz;
• The CPU frequency multiplier can be reduced below the nominal value; the minimal value is 4x;
• The parameters responsible for the working frequency and width of the HyperTransport bus can also be adjusted. The frequency of this bus is set with a multiplier (to the clock generator frequency), which can be set to 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x. The width of the bus can be set to 8 or 16 bits in any direction;
• The CPU voltage can be varied from 0.825V to 1.5625V with 0.0125V increment. There’s another parameter in the BIOS Setup that allows increasing the voltage by 0.1V or 0.2V;
• The memory voltage can be selected manually: from 2.6 to 3.0V with 0.05V increment;
• The chipset voltage can be increased from the default 1.5V to 1.6V.

As we see, this is a pretty impressive list of overclocking-friendly features. We were especially happy to see that the memory voltage can be increased a lot (up to 3.0V). However, at the same time you will not be able to significantly raise the CPU Vcore: the maximum you can get on the CPU with all possible means is 1.76V. In fact, this should be more than enough in most cases anyway.

I would like to stress that it is not very convenient to perform overclocking on ASUS A8V-E Deluxe via BIOS Setup options. First of all, all the options are spread all over the sections of the BIOS. Second, the CPU core voltage is adjusted in a not very clear way. The thing is that the CPU Vcore Offset option cannot be disabled and should either be set at +100mV or +200mV. Therefore, the voltage set in the Hammer Vid control section should be 100 or 200mV lower than desired. And the most unpleasant thing here is the setting of the nominal CPU Vcore in the Hammer Vid control section by selecting the StartUp value: in reality the CPU will receive 0.1 or 0.2V higher voltage anyway.