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Ai Tweaker

Okay, enough of the boring BIOS screens... now we get to the fun stuff!

First thing any self-respecting overclocker will do is disable anything remotely resembling "Ai" overclocking. Sorry Asus, you do a good job on it, but simple 5%-25% "automatic" overclocks just don't cut it for advanced tweakers - which you well know, as you give us so many more nice tweakable parameters!

(As an aside, I always disable the "Spread Spectrum" settings as well.)

The FSB Strap lets us choose from memory dividers the chipset supports for each "approved" FSB setting - but on modern systems, you will normally choose "333" or "400" here, and pick from the DDR3 speeds made available in the DRAM frequency setting.

There is, of course, the normal processor multipler, FSB frequency, and PCIe frequency settings; and I was also glad to see an exposed "DRAM Command Rate" control - even though DDR3 at high speeds is unlikely to run at 1T rates.

There are quite a few DRAM timing parameters to play with.

Strangely, I left the Ai clock twister, skew, and transaction boosters on auto.

Yes, you are seeing right -- I was using 1.575V for the CPU core voltage to get the max overclock; as well as boosing the FSB termination voltage to 1.5V, the memory to 1.86V and the Northbridge voltage to 1.5V.

Here's the "Advanced" tab's "CPU Configuration" screen - for some reason the CPU multiplier is duplicated here, and the C1E (SpeedStep) disable control is here too.

We must be getting close to actual benchmark results now...