Related Articles

Overclocking

To tell you the truth, I was not expecting much overclocking headroom with the P5E-VM. Micro-ATX motherboards are not exactly known to be great overclockers; and motherboard manufacturers tend to limit the BIOS and power systems on their boards to preserve the market for their high end enthusiasts boards.

Boy did I get a pleasant surprise from the Asus P5E-VM HDMI!

With a video card, I was able to boot into the Windows desktop at 535MHz x 6 - but it was not stable; I think giving even more voltage to the northbridge would stabilize it, but frankly, I was worried about frying the northbridge.

500MHz x 8 is stable, with the memory running at 5-5-5-15, when I use a video card.

With the IGP, I was able to run at 450x8, however 500x8 would not even POST.

The biggest limitations in overclocking on this board are the heatsink on the Northbridge, and the limited number of memory dividers; however, with todays pricing, DDR2-1000MHz (PC2-8000) memory is quite affordable, and allows for a 500MHz FSB speed - leaving a great deal of overclocking headroom (50% to be exact) on 1333FSB processors.

And as you saw in the test results, boy did the E8500 scream at 8x500 in this board. 4GHz is good!

Why did I not try to go higher for CPU speed with a lower FSB and a 9.5x multiplier? Simple. I did not want to fry the board. Asus builds great boards, but I doubt that they put quite as much thought into overclocking support with the power distribution on a $150 motherboard as they do on one of their monster $300 enthusiast boards.

In order to hit 4GHz, I did the following:

• Vddr at 2.1V
• Noctua 12 heatsink with dual 12cm fans
• Vcore at 1.5V
• Vfsb at 1.46V
• Vnb at 1.45V
• spread spectrum off
• PCIe speed 100MHz
• memory at 1000-5-5-5-15

I am VERY pleased with how well this board overclocked.

Power Consumption

I thought it would be interesting to do the following comparisons:

• G35 with IGP stock CPU speed vs. G35 with 7800GT stock CPU speed
• G35 and X48 with 7800GT with CPU at stock speed

As you can see, using the integrated GPU saves you about 22W - so a 7800GT uses about 23W to display the Windows desktop.

Interesting, the G35 and the X48 use basically the same amount of power at stock, actually the X48 used a bit less when idle.

The OC'd results are not directly comparable as the X48 result was with the CPU running at 4.37GHz compared to the 4GHz result on the G35.

Conclusion

The Asus P5E-VM HDMI is a great board. Better than I expected - I've learned not to expect much in the way of tweakability on uATX boards.

Given its small size, and reasonable cost, I would not hesitate to use it for a mid-range gaming system. It is almost an overkill for the use it is obviously intended for - a home theatre PC - as you can build quite a gaming rig with the board. Just consider the following configuration:

• Asus P5E-VM HDMI
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 or E8500
• a good 512MB Nvidia 8800GT or AMD 3870
• 2GB of good DDR2 memory

Presto! A very decent gaming box!

Frankly, substitute a 9800GX2 or a 3870X2 for the GPU and you have SLI/Crossfire equivalent - in a micro-ATX case - with VERY good gaming potential. Use a good heatsink like the Noctua 12, and a good power supply, and you should be able to run stably at least at 3.6GHz using 9x400MHz, allowing you to use DDR2-800 low latency memory. Frankly, thats more gaming power than most people need.

The board is so good I am seriously tempted to build a HTPC/gaming box for myself using one of these boards - and an 8800GT would be plenty of GPU for me.