ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Mempipe (NVIDIA nForce 780a SLI)
Author:
Date: 09.09.2008 |
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Overclocking and stability
The power converter uses a 10-phase power scheme, in which there are three 270 mkF and ten 560 mkF capacitors.
As we already stated, the board offers quite a powerful cooling system which includes a massive radiator based on PWM power components. Besides, the user of M3N-HT Deluxe can "play a toy construction set". In particular, you can install an additional fan which is available in the package bundle. Besides, it is also possible to install the Mempipe system on top of the memory modules:
Now move on to examining the overclocking tools which are gathered in the "JumperFree" section.
First, ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Mempipe allows adjusting the HTT speed within 200 to 600 MHz in 1 MHz increments.
The user can change the HyperTransport bus multiplier on the section between the NB and CPU:
This feature is of paramount importance for extreme overclocking. In particular, with the nominal value of this multiplier, we were able raising the HTT speed to merely 248 MHz. With the multiplier reduced to 7 (the nominal value for the HT multiplier in Phenom X3 is 9), we attained 276 MHz.
Here are the remaining overclocking tools:
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Motherboard
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ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Mempipe
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| CPU multiplier adjustable |
+ |
| HTT adjustable |
within 200 MHz to 600 MHz (1 MHz) |
| Vcore adjustment |
within 0.7750 to 1.55V (0.0125V) |
| Vmem adjustment |
within 1.8 to 2.5V (0.02V) |
| Vdd adjustment |
within 1.1 to 1.7V (0.02V) |
| Vdda adjustment |
2.52V; 2.622V; 2.728V; 2.83V |
| Vht adjustable |
within 1.2 to 1.5V (0.02V) |
| Vht (cpu-nb) adjustment |
within 0.7750 to 1.55V (0.0125V) |
| Vnf200 adjustment |
within 1.2 to 1.56V (0.02V) |
| PCI-E adjustment |
within 100 MHz to 200 MHz (1 MHz) |
Now on to the practical overclocking.
Unfortunately, we were unable to attain a stable operation at HTT speeds higher than 276 MHz. Selection of various BIOS firmware versions and replacement of memory modules did not bring any desired result: at that frequency, the board was running absolutely stably, but wouldn't start up at 277 MHz at all.
The question is if such high frequencies are needed. The answer is certainly "yes", because to reveal the frequency capabilities of modern AMD processors a stable operation at HTT speeds at least 300 MHz is needed. In particular, our test processor AMD Phenom X3 8750 safely ran with the nominal multiplier (12).
Therefore, to attain the technology limits for processors with the much lower multiplier the system needs a stable operation at much higher HTT frequencies.
By the way, we tested this motherboard with the CPU Athlon 64 3500+, and the system ran at HTT=300 MHz immediately after the first try (we did not run further experiments with overclocking single-core processors).
We still can't say why we failed to overclock the CPU Phenom. Perhaps further tests of other motherboards will prompt solution to this problem. As regards the integrated graphics core, the BIOS offers no features to overclock it.
In theory, it would be possible to squeeze out a few more megahertz of the CPU clock speed through reducing the number of active CPU cores. This feature is supported by ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Mempipe:
In conclusion, we note a feature which will help beginners overclock the system:
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