Hello all, long time watcher, first time poster. Actually followed the P5W DH Deluxe thread right up until I got the P5Q Deluxe. What can I say, I love ASUS boards.
Well, I have had a lot more trouble getting this board to over clock my Q6600 G0 than I did with the P5W. With the P5W, I just bumped my FSB to 333, didn't have to touch any other voltages, kept Vcore at 1.3 and it worked awesome. Unfortunately I don't think the VRM was up to overclocking quad cores beyond that. I was finally able straightened away what settings needed adjusting to get it to work stably at 3GHz on this board thanks to this thread. Same setting have gotten me to 3.2GHz. So I think I can go back and trim some of them back, as I probably won't go much beyond 3.2GHz for now.
Here are my specs:
Q6600 GO
P5Q Deluxe (of course)
4GB or RAM (4 X 1GB sticks of OCZ Platinum Rev 2 PC6400)
TRUE
And the rest doesn't really matter.
Here are my present settings in the BIOS (0803):
AI Overclock tuner: Manual
CPU Ratio Setting: 9
FSB Strap to North Bridge: 333
FSB Frequency: 355
PCI-E Frequency: 101
DRAM Frequency: 853 (overclocked)
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel A1: AUTO
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel A2: AUTO
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel B1: AUTO
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel B2: AUTO
DRAM Timing Control: Manual
1st Information:
CAS# Latency: 5
DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay: 5
DRAM RAS# Precharge: 5
DRAM RAS# Activate to Precharge: 15
RAS# to RAS# Delay : AUTO
Row Refresh Cycle Time: AUTO
Write Recovery Time: AUTO
Read to Precharge Time: AUTO
2nd Information :
READ to WRITE Delay (S/D): AUTO
Write to Read Delay (S): AUTO
WRITE to READ Delay (D): AUTO
READ to READ Delay (S): AUTO
READ to READ Delay (D): AUTO
WRITE to WRITE Delay (S): AUTO
WRITE to WRITE Delay (D): AUTO
3rd Information :
WRITE to PRE Delay: AUTO
READ to PRE Delay: AUTO
PRE to PRE Delay: AUTO
ALL PRE to ACT Delay: AUTO
ALL PRE to REF Delay: AUTO
DRAM Static Read Control: Disabled
DRAM Read Training: Disabled
MEM. OC Charger: Enabled
AI Clock Twister: Lighter
AI Transaction Booster: Manual
Common Performance Level: 08
All Pull-Ins: Disabled
CPU Voltage: 1.35
CPU GTL Voltage Reference (0/2): 0.63
CPU GTL Voltage Reference (1/3): 0.67
CPU PLL Voltage: 1.52
FSB Termination Voltage: 1.28
DRAM Voltage: 1.90 ( able to go down yet )
NB Voltage: 1.24 ( able to go down yet )
NB GTL Reference: 0.63
SBridge Voltage: 1.1
PCIE SATA Voltage: 1.5
Load Line Calibration: Enabled
CPU Spread Spectrum: Disabled
PCIE Spread Spectrum: Disabled
CPU Clock Skew : Normal
NB Clock Skew : Normal
Advance CPU Settings: All Disabled
Most Onboard stuff disabled (sound, 1394, etc)
I have a few question directed to PMP (I understand he works for ASUS). Is ASUS trying to make some of the other STRAP settings more usable? It seems like 266 works for everything, and 333 works for lower FSB overclocks, and 400 doesn't seem to work at all. As you can see from my bios settings above, I am overclocking my RAM. I would prefer to be running 8X400 with DDR800 (ratio 1:1) and not overclock my RAM, but a FSB of 400 will not boot at a strap of 333 or 400 which would allow me to select DDR801. Maybe I missing something from my BIOS setup that would allow me to use my desired settings. I don't really want to invest in PC8500 or PC9600 at the moment. Seems to me that 1:1 is better anyway.
As a general query and not directed at anyone particular. Is everyone running Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller for their IDE optical drives? It works fine, but I assumed there would be a driver for this. Post Windows install, I thought it must be part of the Marvell SATA driver and went ahead and installed it. The controller was removed from the IDE/ATAPI list and it moved into the SCSI section. Everything seemed to work as far as reading goes, but when I tried burning an Ubuntu ISO using Nero Express 6, it would fail just after writing the Lead-In with a communication error. So I unistalled the Marvell SATA drivers which gave me back the standard IDE setup. At first I didn't look at what mode my DVD writer was set in and burnt the same ISO successfully, but very slowly (16 minutes). I looked and it was stuck in PIO mode. I was finally able to get it back to UDMA2 (which it was before installing the Marvell drivers) with a registry hack. I retested the ISO burn and it was good at 2.5 minutes.
All in all, I have to say I am really impressed with this board so far, but then I have only had it for 4 days. To make a bad analogy, overclocking on this board versus my old P5W is like going straight from kindergarten to university. :shrug:
