X-bit labs

Asus P5E Mainboard Review (page 6)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/18/2007 | 10:55 AM ]

BIOS

Asus P5E mainboard was tested with the BIOS version 0401 dating back to November 6, 2007.

BIOS Setup of Asus P5E mainboard looks very common for those who are familiar with Asus solutions. Therefore, I don’t think you will have any questions about mainboard configuration procedure. The only innovation in the BIOS interface is a new way of voltage setting. Instead of traditional drop-down menu all values can now be entered using keyboard or + and – keys.

All overclocking related options are gathered in Extreme Tweaker section. Here you can manually set the processor frequency multiplier, FSB frequency in the interval between 100 and 800MHz, PCI Express bus frequency and FSB Strap frequency. There is also alternative automatic FSB frequency adjustment that uses EPP/XMP (if the memory supports overclocker profiles in SPD). When the automatic mode is activated, the board selects the optimal system bus frequency on its own.

For memory frequency setting the boast has almost the same set of FSB:Mem dividers as its predecessors on Intel P35 chipset. There is only one new divider – 3:4. Now the complete list of supported dividers looks as follows: 1:1, 5:6, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, 5:8, 3:5 and 1:2. During system bus overclocking some of these dividers may become unavailable, namely, we couldn’t achieve decent results with FSB:Mem set at 4:5. However, since there is a pretty big choice of options available, it is hardly a critical issue.

It is fairly easy to set dividers in BIOS Setup. For each divider you pick the board immediately displays the resulting memory frequency depending on the FSB setting. Moreover, you can also see the default timings at the same time that also helps configure the memory subsystem more efficiently.

Asus P5E allows adjusting all the timing settings:

The list of available parameters and supported ranges are given in the table below:

Besides the timings adjustment, Asus P5E BIOS has additional options that can also affect memory controller performance. Among them are DRAM Static Read Control and Transaction Booster, which we have already discussed in our reviews of P5K mainboard series (see our article called Asus P5K Deluxe Mainboard: Second Encounter), and a new option called Ai Clock Twister.