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ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

Author: Benjamin Sun · 02-07-2007 · Category: Motherboards

Scores

Features: 40
Ergonomics: 9
Compatibility: 25
Support: 10
Performance: 09
Total: 93
How Does it Rank?

The P5W DH Deluxe uses a modified version of the standard American Megatrends Inc BIOS (AMIBIOS) with modifications for ASUS motherboards. The BIOS is broken up into Main, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools and Exit menus. I will discuss each of the main menus in the following page.

The Main menu has controls for the IDE devices, the IDE configuration, the FDD, the System Time, System Date, Language and System Information. The IDE Configuration submenu allows you to configure SATA devices as Standard IDE, AHCI or RAID modes. In AHCI/RAID mode the SATA controller is forced to Native mode. Enhanced Mode is enabled when SATA is forced to RAID mode.

The Advanced Menu is where you do your overclocking on the board. The JumperFree Configuration menu is where AI Overclocking, CPU Frequency, and DRAM Frequency is set. The automatic overclocking by AI is useful for those that want single button overclocks, but the extreme tweaker will want to use the manual profiles.

Battery

The CPU frequency can be set up to 450MHz, allowing the end-user overclocking room. The memory frequency can be set up to 1800MHz, which is above and beyond the available memory on the market (highest being 1066MHz at the moment. The PCI-e frequency can be set from 90MHz-150MHz in 1MHz increments.

Voltage adjustments on this board are incredible. DDR2 voltage can be set from 1.80V-2.40V in 0.10V increments. CPU VCore Voltage can be set from 1.5250V-1.7000V in 0.0125V increments. FSB Termination Voltage can be set from 1.20V-1.50V in 0.1V increments. The MCH chipset voltage can be set from 1.50V-1.65V in 0.05V increments. The ICH7R chipset voltage can be set from1.05V to 1.20V in 0.15V increments.

Overclocked

Overclocking the computer was a breeze, with the ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe. I was able to overclock the 2.66GHz E6700 to 3.1GHz without issue. Trying to overclock the 3.8GHz Pentium 670 we use for motherboard testing is pretty useless, as the CPU is limited by the fact that it runs warm even at normal clock speeds.