Zardon

Well I was going to review the asus P5AD2 motherboard but im not sure if im going to get time and there are already quite a few nice reviews up, but ill share some initial findings with air cooling, a P4 3.4 Extreme edition engineering sample and some Corsair PC4300 and some micron engineering sample DDR2, primarily to test stability of the loaded and very impressive ASUS PsAD2 925x motherboard.



Firstly bearing in mind im using a stock engineering sample intel cooler which is surprisingly good, I didnt want to cook it too much, so I set myself a goal of 1000fsb (250x4), this would have been impossible on a regular extreme edition as you are locked to a 17x200 multi/divider, so first on the list was finding a maximum clock with stock voltage. I found this to be around 3.8ghz (400mhz) overclock. higher gains could be found quite easily with water or a hopefully forthcoming thermalright SLK on slot 775.

So lowering to 15x I slowly tested various settings raising FSB and booting from a memtest+ bootable CD. As the extreme editions take a massive amount of power, I noticed the OCZ powerstream was reading 11.6 on the 12v and even 5 volt had dropped to 4.8, so a little tweaking with the adjustable pots sorted that out. back to reference.



so easy enough, after much stability testing, 1000fsb was possible



loose latencies but DDR666 from 533 ram is pretty impressive !.

by this stage I was beginning to measure Northbridge temperatures and they were rising quite high, so I attached one of my ever faithful zalman arms to the HD rack, and bolted onto it a 120mm 70cfm fan, due to the nice physical coverage I pointed it over the ram and northbridge area, temps dropped a good 10c helped by the asus backplate idea around the CPU slot at the rear. Also as I will be testing micron ram Intel sent me which has no heatspreaders, a little bit of additional cooling at this high clocks is wise.

both corsair and micron held up to DDR333 and even went to DDR680 but with the divider differences the CPU clock was lower.






I really cant praise this motherboard enough, its another wonderful piece of engineering from ASUS and is even better than the rock solid reference INTEL 925x board I have, especially given the massive overclocking options apparent in the bios, 8 onboard sata connections, with DUAL raid, room for a plate with 4 more, IDE with additional raid options, dual gigabyte lan, wireless, you name it its got it and with watercooling or even a thermalright SLK im sure 3.9-4ghz will be acheivable with this setup. With all 4 boards in the slots, 2 corsair and 2 micron the same clocks were possible, much superior to the abit MAX3 I have on 875, anymore than 2 boards and the whole thing went belly up.

Some benchies I ran, 31,230 in 3dmark01se with the asus AX800XT @ 550/550, 14,590 in 3dmark03, and 6,490 in 3dmark05, pcmark the memory score was around 19,000, very nice set of results.

dj_stick

nice overclock, especially on air

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Asmoday

Excellent overclock man!

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Nacht

nice little write-up...makes me wonder what board ill be getting for my next upgrade hehe...too many choices!