Asus P5B (vanilla) Overview

[Timbosan]

Success! I have found the pencil mod for P5B rev 1.03G. Its the same story as ziddey found with the 1.04G - there are 2 resistors that have same resistance as leg 6 to ground (circled red & green in pic). I measured both at 567 Ohms, and IC leg 6 to ground = 567 Ohms.
Shading did not lower resistance much at all. I got it down to ~550. I rubbed it off and used a thin smear of conductive silver compound (almost dead short) which i rubbed back thinner to increase resistance to ~517 Ohms. At first i tried resistor circled green. I powered on with no ram & measured vdimm = 1.35v! no good. I removed the silver with acetone and tried the resistor i have circled red.

At 517 Ohms, i got the following voltages:

Bios----Real

1.8v----1.98v
1.9v----2.08v
2.0v----2.15v
2.1v----2.24v

I should note my dmm measured vdimm before mod was 2.06v when setting 2.1v in bios.
I had some dramas with no post a few times after doing the mod, at 2.24v. I fully powered off and rebooted & got overclocking failed message. After some experimenting, it seems my ram doesnt like more than 2.08v. It will do 916MHz on 2.08v but not fully tested stable yet. Im not happy about that. However at lower speeds, the ram runs fine at 2.24v, so the mod works.

I also fixed my high temperature problem - i didnt have PECI enabled in bios. I now have it enabled and TAT reads 39/41 idle, 62/64 under full load, same as core temp. That is at 1.344v stable (vdroop modded).

[eklipze]

GREAT JOB !. timbo i'll surely test that out . thanks!. yeah i need some vdimm mod too. my rams holding me back. and i can't crank up the voltage anymore haha. nice one

[ziddey]

well done timbosan. i don't know how many people have wanted pencil vdimm for 1.03g. and i've tried to tell people to find them, but you've been the first to actually follow through. people will love you

[htredneck]

Hello All:

I found this page and form about a week ago and it seems to be exactly what I am looking for. I have built my own computers for years but I have never overclocked or changed memory timings, voltage etc before. I have had the P5B vanilla for about a month now and it works great. Now I want to start experimenting a little. I will update the CPU in a few weeks when prices go down a little. Can anyone recommend some memory, CPU and voltage settings I might try with the following hardware?

Thanks
Great Form

[Timbosan]

well done timbosan. i don't know how many people have wanted pencil vdimm for 1.03g. and i've tried to tell people to find them, but you've been the first to actually follow through. people will love you

Yeah it had to be done. Thanks for the help mate

[Timbosan]

Hello All:

I found this page and form about a week ago and it seems to be exactly what I am looking for. I have built my own computers for years but I have never overclocked or changed memory timings, voltage etc before. I have had the P5B vanilla for about a month now and it works great. Now I want to start experimenting a little. I will update the CPU in a few weeks when prices go down a little. Can anyone recommend some memory, CPU and voltage settings I might try with the following hardware?

Thanks
Great Form

I dont have much experience with prescotts. Just keep vcore under 1.4v (air cooled) and keep temps under 60-70, best to be under 60*C.
vMCH - set to 1.2v and if needed increase to 1.45v
vdimm - 2.1v should see 900MHz @ 5-5-5-15 from that ram depending on the version (micron ic's clock better).
Set ram timing by SPD - disable this & set timing manually 5-5-5-15 for about the 900 mhz, test for errors & play with timings.
Lock pic-e frequency to 100 (increase to 101 - 110 if games/vid benches crashing)
Lock pci frequency to 33.3

That should get you started. Post back if you need anything

[frode3]

ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...B/P5B-1501.zip

[***Deimos***]

About the PCIE clock. I think I have either 100 or 101 set in BIOS.
Based on some comments I think I should increase to 110 or more. I ran small-FFT at 2.92Ghz for 2 hours, with <50C. However, playing BF2 after about an hour at 2.8Ghz (notice lower fsb and mem clocks), the game gets choppy for no apparent reason, and/or I get blue screen.

First impression was that the default clocks on video card are too agressive or poor cooling, but it barely gets over 60C.

Can somebody please confirm that PCIE fixes such issues, and if so what value to set?

[htredneck]

Thanks

I got the RAM at 5-5-5-15 now. The SPD had it set at 5-5-5-18. It seems to be working fine with the new settings but I don´t real know what this means. I will buy a new CPU in a few weeks but I am not sure which one. Could someone recommend one with a good cost/performance ratio that would go well with my hardware?

Thanks

[Discoboy]

ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...5/P5B/1601.zip

[Timbosan]

its not on the normal website & there's no description of what changes have been made so i'd wait till you know its not beta....

[eklipze]

thats the P5b. not P5bv. thats probably why you don't see it on the site

[ziddey]

p5b is ptb vanilla is you crazy

[Timbosan]

Thanks

I got the RAM at 5-5-5-15 now. The SPD had it set at 5-5-5-18. It seems to be working fine with the new settings but I don&#180;t real know what this means. I will buy a new CPU in a few weeks but I am not sure which one. Could someone recommend one with a good cost/performance ratio that would go well with my hardware?

Thanks

What speed are you at so far? There are some good threads in the general memory section that explain memory timings. They instruct the ram how to operate, basically how long to wait before executing a certain command. The '18' on the end is very 'loose', and your ram should be fine with 15, maybe lower. There are also subtimings, so a loose starting point would be (read down the screen):

5-5-5-15-6-42-8-11-12-15 - should be ok for 900MHz ~2.1v

standard timing for your ram at 800mhz is:
5-5-5-12-6-42-3-11-5-14

The higher you push it the looser the timings need to be. For a cpu recommendation, depends what you wanna do with it, but i like the e6300, e6400 as a match for the P5B and some PC6400. The e6400 is probably a better match for P5B & PC6400 as many e6300's can do 500 mhz+ which a lot of PC6400 cant do. 1000mhz+ capable ram isnt cheap.

[Discoboy]

ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...B/P5B-1604.zip

[htredneck]

Thanks for the great answers. Here is some info from Everest. I am looking at 3 different processors:

E6300
E6320
E6600

I will be doing a little of everything (some over clocking, Games, video editing etc.)

As always, any help would be great.


CPU Properties:
CPU Type Intel Pentium 4 530J
CPU Alias Prescott
CPU Stepping E0
Engineering Sample No
CPUID CPU Name Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
CPUID Revision 00000F41h

CPU Speed:
CPU Clock 3373.3 MHz (original: 3000 MHz, overclock: 12%)
CPU Multiplier 15.0x
CPU FSB 224.9 MHz (original: 200 MHz, overclock: 12%)
Memory Bus 449.8 MHz
DRAM:FSB Ratio 12:6

CPU Cache:
L1 Trace Cache 12K Instructions
L1 Data Cache 16 KB
L2 Cache 1 MB (On-Die, ECC, ATC, Full-Speed)

Motherboard Properties:
Motherboard ID 64-1501-000001-00101111-062607-Intel-BW$A0545000_BIOS DATE: 06/26/07 16:11:44 VER: 08.00.12
Motherboard Name Asus P5B (3 PCI, 3 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI-E x16, 4 DDR2 DIMM, Audio, Gigabit LAN)

Chipset Properties:
Motherboard Chipset Intel Broadwater P965
Memory Timings 5-5-5-15 (CL-RCD-RP-RAS)
Command Rate (CR) 2T

SPD Memory Modules:
DIMM1: Corsair CM2X1024-6400 1 GB DDR2-800 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-18 @ 400 MHz) (4-4-4-13 @ 270 MHz)
DIMM3: Corsair CM2X1024-6400 1 GB DDR2-800 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-18 @ 400 MHz) (4-4-4-13 @ 270 MHz)

BIOS Properties:
System BIOS Date 06/26/07
Video BIOS Date 01/25/07
DMI BIOS Version 1501

Graphics Processor Properties:
Video Adapter Asus EN7900GS
GPU Code Name G71GS (PCI Express x16 10DE / 0292, Rev A1)
GPU Clock (Geometric Domain) 570 MHz (original: 470 MHz, overclock: 21%)
GPU Clock (Shader Domain) 549 MHz (original: 450 MHz, overclock: 22%)
GPU Clock (ROP Domain) 549 MHz (original: 450 MHz, overclock: 22%)
Memory Clock 763 MHz (original: 660 MHz, overclock: 16%)

[daimaah]

Any idea why my system is reporting some weird temperatures and fan speeds?

Currently it's saying that the CPU temperature is 233 degrees (celcius), the case fan is at ~5000 RPM (runs at 1200 in real life) and CPU Fan (which I don't have, running passively) reports 41 RPM.

The core temperatures are fine, the motherboard temperature is fine...

[ziddey]

are you using aisuite/asusprobe for those readings? what happens if you turn on peci in the bios?

i've seen the 41rpm as well. I think it might be poor grounding design by asus. does the case fan read 5000 in a different board?

[daimaah]

are you using aisuite/asusprobe for those readings? what happens if you turn on peci in the bios?

i've seen the 41rpm as well. I think it might be poor grounding design by asus. does the case fan read 5000 in a different board?

AI Suite and Everest both. Everest won't even show the CPU temperature if AI Suite says it's high (dunno what's the limit).

I haven't tried the case fan on another system, but it's a high quality one, shouldn't have any problems reporting the correct readings.

To add more weirdness into all this... the readings are fine for a short while (could be minutes, could be days) after rebooting, but get out of scale afterwards. The readings have been correct for almost a year now and I just one day realized that they're off.

About PECI... no, haven't tried and from what I've read, it's the old, inaccurate way of reporting the readings, so I'd rather not use it.

[ziddey]

peci's not the old way

[***Deimos***]

AI Suite and Everest both. Everest won't even show the CPU temperature if AI Suite says it's high (dunno what's the limit).

I haven't tried the case fan on another system, but it's a high quality one, shouldn't have any problems reporting the correct readings.

To add more weirdness into all this... the readings are fine for a short while (could be minutes, could be days) after rebooting, but get out of scale afterwards. The readings have been correct for almost a year now and I just one day realized that they're off.

About PECI... no, haven't tried and from what I've read, it's the old, inaccurate way of reporting the readings, so I'd rather not use it.

You shouldn't have to enable PECI. If I recall it provides another way for 3rd party tools to get hardware monitoring info. If settings in BIOS are wonky, then that wont help.

CPU temperature is read from C2D on-chip diode. If I recall correctly, the value you get is how many degrees below threshold you're at. (ie if 85C is max, tell BIOS "-50C" when you're at 35C). There could be some BIOS corruption which is why value is read wrong, or as others have suggested the hardware monitor chip could be malfunctioning (and/or bad contact). Since your fan speed is read unusually high, most likely the hardware monitoring chip is busted. Its not unusual. I've had HW chip (typically Windbond) die unexplicably before.

[MikeHunt79]

I've hit a brick wall.


This is as high as I can get it. If I change the FSB to 334 or more, the machine reboots. i've tried raising the vcore, vdimm, and vchip, but it still continues to crash. Anything else I can try?

It is just because it's going over 3ghz or something?

Spec:
e4300
asus p5b motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-5300C3 667MHz
stock cooler (going on water soon)

vcore set to 1.425v in BIOS (I get quite a bit of vdroop)
vdimm 1.9v
vchip 1.45v (max I can set in BIOS)

I forgot to mention, I've got a 40mm fan on the northbridge, and a zalman passive northbridge cooler on the soutchbridge to try and keep everything cool. My SB was getting really roasty before the zalman!

Anyway, I'm gonna try dropping the multi to 6x now and see how much FSB I can get. Orthos blend seems to be doing ok at 334Mhz x 6 right now....

EDIT: Just noticed my LAN port has stopped working now I've start overclocking.... anyone else getting this?

[Timbosan]

Could be ram, what speed and timings is your ram at? and no my lan port is fine im at FSB 486 MHz.

[eklipze]

@timbosan

can you give me the instructions on how what to do with your mod, few posts back. i want to get my Vdimm modded too. TIA.

[Timbosan]

@timbosan

can you give me the instructions on how what to do with your mod, few posts back. i want to get my Vdimm modded too. TIA.

I tried to explain it in that post. Ok, you must have a digital multi meter, to measure the resistance of the resistor, and to measure the dimm voltage achieved after modding. Dont even try it without one. I covered the resistor i have circled red in my pic with conductive silver & let it dry. This made the resistance 0 ohms to ground. I rubbed the silver back with a toothpick soaked in acetone to remove some of the silver. I stopped when i had a resistance of 517 ohms across the resistor & from leg 6 to ground (was originally 567 ohms). I powered on without ram, and measured the vdimm at the measure points (ground & coil leg) -- pic's of the measure points are either in this thread or the P5B modding thread. When you have the desired voltages, boot up with your ram in & have some fun!

PS -- If you take it up over 4v vdimm the board will power off then back on then off etc. I think its the OVP kicking in. Funniest thing is i had measured the vdimm as 2.Xv , then booted with an old stick of XMS2 DDR800 in.......the silver dried more, resistance fell, voltage spiked over 4v & the board shut off lol. But the ram is still alive!

Point of this story - Let the silver dry completely before you power on. It would be better to do it properly with a variable resistor. I only did it this way temporarily to see if any gains could be made.

PS -- do this mod at your own risk, i just had to say it.