Overclocking from the BIOS

I have already mentioned above that our test processor can speed up to 490MHz FSB. At first everything went on smoothly - Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard booted just fine at this speed. However, that was about it: we couldn’t get it to operate stably no matter what settings we used. By playing with voltages we could get the board to run stable from a few seconds up to a few minutes at most, but it was not enough to pass the OCCT stability test.

So, we decided to waste no more time on the older BIOS version and reflashed the original one back. But the situation turned out even worse. Now the board could only boot at 490MHz FSB, but couldn’t load the operating system any more. We tried to increase the processor, memory and chipset voltages and were constantly monitoring them. As we noticed with the help of the monitoring tools the first voltage to go up was the memory voltage, then the processor voltage went up after we rebooted the system second time, and as for the chipset voltage it never increased at all. This could be the reason why the board couldn’t operate stable at 490MHz FSB, which is pretty high frequency for the nominal chipset voltage.

So, we had to go back to the older BIOS version again to find the frequency when the Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard would be running stably. It failed to hit 485MHz FSB, but worked fine at 480MHz FSB ?not a record, but a pretty good result, overall.

At first we were going to compare the performance of Biostar TP35D2-A7 against that of an appropriate rival. However, before we started our performance test session we needed to optimize the work of the memory subsystem, especially since the predecessor, Biostar TForce P965, used to have some issues with correct timings settings back in the days. So, I got to the corresponding BIOS section to try lowering the memory timings and was amazed to discover that Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard allows setting the timings only to 5-5-5 or 6-6-6, but not lower than that! There is simply no way to set the timings to 3-3-3 or 4-4-4. Or maybe these timings also disappeared at some point, just like that fan rotation speed control options? Later on I reflashed the newer BIOS version one more time and checked that it doesn’t have any issues like that: the complete set of standard DDR2 timing settings is all there: from 3 to 6. However, this BIOS version is considerably less stable than the older one and doesn’t allow achieving the same high results during overclocking as the older one.

Moreover, I have later on discovered one more peculiarity of the Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard. The default memory timing settings on it are the same as those on any other Intel P35 Express based mainboards.

However, this turned out to be true only for the “cold start? If you reboot the system, all memory timings will remain the same, but the Performance Level will increase from 8 to 12. The performance is known to depend on this parameter a lot: the lower is the Performance Level setting, the better. And in our case, the board slows down dramatically after rebooting. To check things out I ran Lavalys Everest Cache & Memory Benchmark:

?/td>	Read	Write	Copy	Latency
Performance Level 8	9061	8714	8220	55.0
Performance Level 12	8340	8621	7932	62.7

Now we have no doubts that MemSet utility doesn’t make mistakes. It is true, the memory subsystem performance does in fact drop after rebooting the system, and hence the overall system performance drops, too.

I have to admit that this is one of the least stable mainboards I have ever come across in our lab so far. The memory subsystem jumps up and down and is hard to predict. However, we decided to give it another chance to redeem itself.