Asus P5WD2 Premium: DDR2-1066 and the Promise of 955x SLI
by Wesley Fink on May 11, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Asus P5WD2 Premium: Overclocking
FSB Overclocking Results
| Front Side Bus Overclocking Testbed | |
| Processor: | Pentium 4 Prescott LGA 775 560 ES (2.8GHz-3.6GHz) |
| CPU Voltage: | 1.425V (1.3875V default) |
| Cooling: | Thermaltake Jungle 502 |
| Power Supply: | OCZ Power Stream 600 |
| Maximum CPU OverClock: | 227x18 (4086MHz) +14% |
| Maximum FSB OC: | 291FSB x 14 (4074MHz) +46% |
Asus has fully implemented Speedstep in their recent BIOS updates for Intel Socket 775 motherboards, so the OC results are a lot more than academic. Speedstep means that the stock multiplier and a 14X multiplier will be available on all Prescott CPUs, opening new options for overclocking regular Intel Prescott chips.
With a stock multiplier, the P5WD2 reached an overclock of 227x18 or 4086MHz. This matches the highest frequency ever reached with this 3.6GHz Prescott, which was with an Asus 915 chipset board. The 46% FSB overclock achieved at the 14X multiplier is the highest OC that we have seen with a SATA drive on a Socket T board. The previous Socket T record on this CPU was 279FSB.
While we were able to reach these OC levels above 4GHz with the Thermaltake HSF, the long-term stability with air cooling at these speeds is very suspect. After running a few tests, the system began throttling - alternating between stock speed and reduced speed due to overheating. There is no doubt that the CPU can do these speeds, but you will have to provide better cooling if you plan to run much above 3.8GHz. Others have demonstrated even higher Prescott overclocks and stable operation with water cooling and phase-change cooling.
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fitten - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#5 Differences of 3% are usually in the noise of the type tests that most benchmark sites run. 3% is effectively 0% since that is beneath the precision of the tests.Calin - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Higher speed memory will only give you a real performance boost if you use one of the fastest processors. On a slower processor, all that extra memory bandwidth will not help at all (or very little)Carfax - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
I wonder, is Intel ever going to introduce processors with a FSB greater than 1066 before they go to CSI? All this DDR2 bandwidth is going to waste..Darth Farter - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
what is the msrp for these boards, cause that $255/$248 prices on newegg/ZZF are hard to ignore...Pjotr - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
"i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing....."nVidia uses HyperTransport between NB and SB. They have since nForce1 on AMD and they also use it in X-Box, if you didn't know.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#5 - We didn't measure the difference in nF4 Intel and nF4 AMD at 2T. It was a subjective comment. So I have tried to better explain what I found in the paragraph you quote:"On the nF4 Intel platform, the performance impact of a 2T Command Rate appears to be rather small, as the nF4 Intel performance remains very competetive with the 955x as far as it goes. However, at just over DDR2-900, the nF4 Intel appears to hit a wall . . ."
Zebo - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
"it would have been better to include a fx-55 as competition "Not for INTC;)
Man that's a nice chipset they got though so missed from nV:)
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
overclockingoodness -Both boards are rated at DDR2-667, but both easily ran DDR2-800 with the right memory, which is the next logical memory speed. We mainly wanted to see if DDR2-800 made any real performance difference, and the answer is no in Office and Multimedia, and yes in most gaming. For the future this also gives us a full set of benchmarks at DDR2-800 for comparison if we choose to use them.
We also found the Asus 955X did a marginal DDR2-1066 in early testing so it seemed reasonable to at least test and report benchmarks at the very stable DDR2-800 in addition to DDR2-667. We won't be doing this with all future boards, but the tests did provide some answers to our questions.
mrwxyz - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing.....Lonyo - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
On page 5 you mention 2T having less of an impact than with AMD boards.Does that mean it has absolutely zero impact then?
There's a thread on the forums showing 2T for AMD haveing REAL WORLD impacts of maybe 3% slowdown, nothing more except in synthetic tests, so I suppose on the Intel board it makes maybe 1% difference.