Fine Tuning Tricks

The recent poll we held on our site showed that Asus mainboards are the most popular out there. About 44% of our readers prefer mainboards from Asus. And it means that Asus P5K Deluxe based on the new Intel P35 chipset has all the chances to become a pretty demanded platform for systems with Core 2 Duo processors. At least, it should be as popular as the P5B Deluxe that has because the choice of many computer enthusiasts. That is why we decided to pay special attention to some fine tuning tricks you could use on Asus P5K Deluxe in order to achieve maximum performance. Especially since the BIOS Setup of this solution offers you a lot of new unique features.

1T Command Rate

The latest BIOS versions for this mainboard allow enabling 1T Command Rate mode. As you already know, all Intel chipsets used to work only with 2T Command Rate and didn’t allow the user to adjust this memory controller setting. By the way, this parameter allows boosting the performance pretty impressively in platforms on Nvidia nForce 600i core logic.

Unfortunately, the adjustment of Command Rate parameter on Asus P5K Deluxe is not always beneficial. Its operation depends on the selected FSB:Mem divider. To be more exact, we only confirmed that 1T Command Rate can be set for 5:6 or 5:8 memory frequency dividers. With all other dividers, 1T Command Rate results in system instability and hence cannot be used.

As far as the efficiency of this function is concerned, we decided to check it out by testing the system performance with different timings settings and different Command Rate settings. the tests were run on an Asus P5K Deluxe based platform with the FSB frequency set to 400MHz. Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor we used in this testbed was configured as 8 x 400MHz, i.e. it was overclocked to 3.2GHz. Other testbed components were the same as during our overclocking experiments.

The tests showed that by setting Command Rate to 1T we managed to slightly increase the performance of the memory controller. The bandwidth increases and latency drops. However, the actual performance gain we get is not that significant. In real applications the system speeds up by 0.5% at most. So, pushing the memory frequency one step up turns out more efficient than fighting for a more aggressive Command Rate setting. And taking into account that 1T Command Rate lowers the memory frequency potential quite noticeably, we cannot state that this setting is a useful one. It will hardly help you achieve maximum performance.