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| ASUS M2R32 MVP Clocking like a Banshee | |
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(Review by MS, Dec. 19, 2006) |
BIOS
As in essentially all current ASUS boards, American Megatrends Inc (AMI) supplies the BIOS for the M2R32 MVP. The layout is in the traditional grey and blue with a little eye-candy in the form of a scrolling bar at the top of each page. Key features of interest for the overclocker are found in the "Advanced" menu, starting with the overclocking for dummies option a.k.a. AI Overclocking and the different shades of system optimization. For most users, the N.O.S. as in Non-Delay Overclocking System will suffice for bragging rights, otherwise there is the option of selecting different overclock profiles from 3% all the way to 30%. What sounds like a good idea in theory turns out to be somewhat disappointing since even at a 15% OC selection, the system simply did not boot. Fortunately for us all, the days where boot failure forced a clearing of the CMOS settings are over, all it takes is a power-off to revert to the default setting that will go through POST and end up in an error message that OC failed.
A bit of confusion is added by the fact that, reverting from a selected OC profile to a manual configuration does not change the setting back to default, rather the non-workable OC settings are imported into the "manual" setup and as a result, the system will still not boot on the next reset - that is, unless the default value is put in manually (or by loading the setup default in the "Exit" menu).
As in most current boards, the ASUS-AMI BIOS features its own built-in EZ Flash2 utility, meaning that there is no need to have any DOS or Windows98 OS present for flashing the BIOS, simply entering the BIOS and selecting the Flash utility in the "Tools" section will do the trick. One thing to keep in mind is that EZ Flash2 does not support the NTFS file system, that means, that the source file of the new BIOS will have to be read off a floppy drive or a USB flash device with FAT formatting.
In terms of the overall layout, it is still a bit confusing to have the CPU parameters in the "jumperfree setup" and the memory settings in the "CPU configuration" but we have gotten so used to it that it is easy to overlook these issues - that still prevail for the novice. As mentioned earlier, there is no documentation of the BIOS features in the manual at all, which exacerbates this problem.
High-lighted features of the BIOS are the "ASUS O.C. Profile" which is different from the "overclocking profile" and lets the user save specific customized CMOS configurations in a separate portion of the BIOS chip and the CrashFree BIOS that launches a BIOS recovery whenever it thinks it detects a BIOS corruption. The latter can also occur if the system marginally initializes but then hangs at the advanced stages of the Power On Self Test.
As not expected otherwise, the system offers overclocking tools galore, with Bus frequency selections from 200-400 MHz, PCIe frequency selection, and voltage manipulations for essentially every component on the motherboard, including CPU and memory. For the bravehearts in the OC community, the latter selection goes all the way to 2.45V, which is hardly needed since most memory modules flat-line after about 2.1-2.2 V anyway in their frequency gains.
Fortunately, some of the more esoteric settings as for example manual configuration of the read preamble or DLL enable are omitted from the menus, this certainly helps avoiding some misconfigurations. About the most exotic setting is the AI clock skew for the memory channels, as a rule of thumb, if there are differences in the trace length between the different channels, the skew needs to be set to different advances; this primarily applies to a classical layout with the two channel slots grouped. In the case of the M3R32 MVP with an interleaved physical arrangement, that is, each color-coded group has one slot for each channel, the traces are matched, therefore, the advance value should be the same for both channels.
One of the more important settings for memory performance is the Command Rate. Briefly, a 1T CMD Rate allows the memory controller to issue addresses and commands on every memory bus clock rising edge, whereas a 2T rate forces the controller to skip at least one beat on consecutive commands or addresses. Especially in the case of interleaving accesses, this can have a performance impact. According to specs, at 800 MHz, AMD's on die memory controller forces a 2T CMD Rate but as usual, there are certain tricks that can be played to override some of these restrictions. As a result, the M2R32 allows to run at 800 MHz memory clock with a 1T command rate.
1T CMD Rate (left) vs. 2T CMD Rate (right): The Sandra results show indeed a difference!
In the past, we have often seen BIOS settings that were available but that in reality were not executed, regardless of what the BIOS screen said. The same, albeit to a lesser degree is true for some system monitoring utilities that are reading either the BIOS or else some of the system's PCI registers. In short, if the respective bits are set in the register but the setting is not allowed, then even these monitoring utilities will show the wrong results. Benchmarks, on the other hand, will show some kind of impact on performance in most cases, especially in the case of the command rate. Suffice it to say that the difference shows up primarily in memory benchmarks whereas, contrary to urban legends, in real world applications there is hardly any difference between 1T and 2T.
next page: => Test Setup, Installation and Overclocking =>
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