Asus P5LD2 Deluxe (Intel 945P)
Overclocking and stability
Prior to moving to overclocking, let's look into the power converter. It uses a 4-phase power scheme, in which there are five 1000 mkF, five 820 mkF, and eleven 680 mkF capacitors. To improve the cooling of the power supply module, the Asus Stack Cool technology is used which is an aluminum radiator on the front side of the board.
Now on to the overclocking features.
First off, Asus P5LD2 allows adjusting the system bus speed within 100 to 450 MHz in 1 MHz increments.
Of convenience is that you can enter the desired FSB value from the keyboard.
Secondly, Asus P5LD2 allows adjusting the processor voltage (Vcore) within a very wide range: within 1.3V to 1.7V in 0.0125V increments.
The advanced user can raise the Vmem from the nominal 1.8V up to 2.3V (in 0.05-0.1V increments).
Besides, we get a useful feature for raising the chipset voltage on both the north bridge (within 1.5V to 1.65V in 0.05V increments)
and the south bridge.
Its admissible values are 1.05V and 1.2V. Besides, it is also possible to raise voltage on the FSB from 1.2V to 1.5V in 0.1V increments.
You can also adjust the speed of the PCI Express bus within 90 MHz to 150 MHz,
and fix the PCI bus (which is important for correct functioning of hard disks):
Note that programmers at Asus have added the feature for highlighting the parameters exceeding the range of safe overclocking with different colors.
Now let's try the overclocking features in practice. To start with, Asus P5LD2 demonstrated excellent results: stable operation at FSB = 316MHz with an Extreme Edition processor,
as well as stable operation at FSB = 294MHz with Pentium4 660.
Now regarding the "AI Overclocking" parameter aimed at beginner users.
Through a simple selection of the required value, the user can overclock the system (through raising the FSB speed) by 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 30%, as well as select from a number of standard combinations.
The system will permanently run in the overclocked mode, which will affect negatively on the temperature regime. So, the more preferred option is the NOS (Non-Delay Overclocking System) mode in which overclocking is done on-demand. Simply put, the raise of FSB speed occurs at the time a resource-hungry application (e.g., a game) starts up. On closing the application, the system reverts to the rated frequency.
Selection of the overclocking extent is adjusted with the "Target Frequency" option:
In combination with the Q-Fan feature,the NOS will allow many users get a nice performance boost. Of course, hardcore overclockers would prefer a permanent overclock, through adjusting the BIOS settings. We should also remember that the Prescott (2M) core emits too much heat, even with using mechanisms for reducing the frequency and voltages during the idle time. Therefore, permanent operation in the overclocked mode is not a reasonable option (for Intel systems).
As regards the programmatical overclocking, there is the AI Booster utility:
The current version of the program can't change the memory frequency multiplier, so its usefulness is quite limited.
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