Performance during Overclocking

As we know from our previous experience, relative performance of overclocker platforms is very often different from the favorable testing conditions in nominal operational mode. Therefore, we decided to see what would happen if we set the FSB frequency at 460MH. Since we used the same Core 2 Duo E8500 processor with 9.5x multiplier, its frequency rose to 4.37GHz, which is a very decent result these days. To ensure system stability at this speed we increased CPU Vcore to 1.45V.

DDR3 SDRAM in both systems worked in synchronous mode at 1840MHz frequency with 8-8-8-24-1T timings.

The very first Everest results obtained on ASUS Striker II NSE were unacceptably low for these testing conditions. Read speed and latency at 460MHz FSB were even lower than what we saw in the nominal mode. It immediately suggested that nForce 790i SLI seems to have inherited a typical issue of the previous generation nForce chipsets called FSB Strap. For example, nForce 680i SLI based mainboards suffered this typical performance drop at 450MHz FSB, exactly what we are seeing right now.

Does it mean that it doesn’t make sense to overclock processors on nForce 790i SLI based mainboards with the FSB frequency beyond 450MHz? Luckily, it doesn’t. Nvidia managed to resolve this issue in the latest BIOS versions for their newest chipset. The BIOS for ASUS Striker II NSE got new options with mysterious names “P1” and “P2” that eliminate the negative effort from FSB Strap. For instance, this is what you can achieve if you activate them at 460MHz FSB setting:

I believe you will not argue about the benefits of these undocumented functions. Therefore, we continued our ASUS Striker II NSE tests during overclocking with the “magic” P1 and P2 parameters enabled.

As a result, our nForce 790i SLI based mainboard managed to outperform ASUS P5E3 Premium in Everest tests during overclocking.

However, as we know, advantage in Everest means only one thing: that Nvidia’s preliminary sampling algorithms are not a marketing trick – they do work.

So, it is high time we checked out the performance of our testing participants in real applications and complex tests:

Overclocking didn’t really change the situation. ASUS P5E3 Premium is again ahead of ASUS Striker II NSE in almost every test, however the advantage of the Intel X48 Express based solution is overall insignificant. Only Half-Life 2 results stand out: P5E3 Premium mainboard manages to get pretty far ahead of the competitor.