It looks like ASUS engineers tried to increase the reliability of their A8V-E Deluxe mainboard by raising the memory controller latencies. However, they failed to actually succeed. The testing showed that the board doesn’t run stably enough with memory modules designed to support low timings. For example, when we installed Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO or Corsair TWINX1024-3200XL memory modules based on popular Samsung TCCD chips into our ASUS A8V-E Deluxe based platform, it lost its stability. It resulted into complete freezing during the memory test run by S&M utility and into constant failing to go through the Memory Benchmark from the Futuremark PCMark04 test set. To tell the truth, we don’t know how to overcome these issues. At least, we failed to regain any stability by changing the memory timings in the BIOS or raising Vmem and Vchipset. Note that with the memory working at 400MHz and supporting less aggressive timings, the problem disappeared and the platform worked well.

Among the overclocking friendly options I should probably also mention the PEG Link Mode of the BIOS Setup. This parameter allows overclocking PCI Express x16 graphics cards on ATI chips. However, we would advise you to disable this option, because you will get much better results if you overclock the graphics card individually, and do not rely on the mainboard options here.

Well, now that we introduced to you all options for CPU overclocking available on our ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard, it is high time we got down to some practical experiments. Our test session will allow us to find the maximum clock generator frequency when the platform remains stable. For our tests we used AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (working at the nominal 2.4GHz) with the clock multiplier preliminarily reduced to 8x. In order to eliminate the limitations imposed by the memory potential, we reduced the memory working frequency down to the guaranteed supported values.

First of all I would like to stress the fact that the HyperTransport multiplier doesn’t in any way affect the overclocking results on ASUS A8V-E Deluxe. In other words, even if you set this multiplier to the maximum supported value of 5X, the mainboard will still work at the top clock generator frequency without any problems: ASUS A8V-E Deluxe owes this ability to the VIA K8T890 chipset architecture. In fact, we have already got used to reducing the HyperTransport bus multiplier, because of the constant problems with high working frequencies of this bus on NVIDIA nForce4 chipset. Actually, this is the case only for NVIDIA chipsets. So, we have every right to state that VIA K8T890 chipset works much better and more correct with the HyperTransport than NVIDIA nForce4 chipset family.

So, it is a way easier to overclock AMD Athlon 64 processors on VIA K8T890- based mainboards. But unfortunately, I wouldn’t call ASUS A8V-E Deluxe an overclocker’s choice. Even though it boasts a lot of overclocking friendly options and parameters, our experiments showed that it is not as efficient as it might seem at first sight. The maximum clock generator frequency when ASUS A8V-E Deluxe retains its stability is only 266MHz. It is simply impossible to increase the frequency any further: the mainboard wouldn’t start if the frequency is set at a higher value. No other tricks helped us to get beyond the notorious 266MHz.

So, the summary of our overclocking results will look as follows:

In other words, the overclocking potential of ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard is lower than that of most NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra/SLI based solutions. Although in most cases it should still be enough for normal overclocking experience without reducing the CPU clock frequency multiplier.

Besides the automatic and dynamic overclocking technologies, ASUS A8V-E Deluxe also supports Cool’n’Quiet technology reducing the processor frequency in case of low utilization. The remarkable thing about it is the fact that this technology can work together with the AI NOS. In other words, if the CPU is not loaded that heavily, its frequency and core voltage will be reduced, however, then the CPU gets loaded in full, it gets automatically overclocked beyond the nominal speed. Note that Cool’n’Quiet works only if the CPU clock multiplier is set to default.

ASUS A8V-E Deluxe boasts one more interesting feature: it can control the processor fan speed judging by the processor temperature. You can set the optimal temperature values in the mainboard BIOS Setup and the fan rotation speed will be automatically adjusted accordingly.